Historian Owsei Temkin has argued passionately for the necessity of chronicling and analyzing the history of medicine. The essays presented here span his career, bringing together new pieces and many that were previously unavailable outside the journals in which they were originally published.

Dr Temkin also writes on topics in the history of science, including the Age of Copernicus, as well as Gall and the phrenological movement. The final essay in the book brings the volume full circle, reproducing Dr Temkin's obituary for Edelstein - included, he writes, to atone for his own more recent distancing from Edelstein's views.