Somewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world, a woman named Metrodora wrote down everything she knew about healing --- carefully, systematically, in the formal language of medical authority --- and trusted that the thread she was casting forward would hold. It did. One manuscript. One slender, improbable thread running through a thousand years of silence, misattribution, and near-oblivion. Harmonia traces that thread from Metrodora's hand to the Laurentian Library in Florence, and from there into the lecture halls and clinics of a world that is only now beginning to understand what survived --- and what it means that it did.

Read the transcript

Share and read comments.