The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (1997)

If you read one survey, make it this one. Porter starts with the Hippocratic tradition and runs to the present day of the late 1990s in a little over 800 pages, with chapters on Indian and Chinese medicine alongside the Western story he mostly tells. What keeps it from being a parade of great men is his argument that better social conditions, hygiene and diet did more for people's health than purely medical advances. He keeps society in view throughout, and he ends wary rather than triumphant about what modern medicine promises. It is long, but the chapters stand alone, so it works as a reference you dip into whenever another book on this list leaves you wanting the bigger picture.