From Pain to Poison

Pain has a profound effect on our bodies when we are experiencing it millions of nerve cells deep within our brains are firing telling us it hurts and for centuries the challenge has been to find something that will lessen or even switch off these sensations to bring us relief In this programme well discover just what pain is why we want to control it and how we ultimately did it when the

Infection can take over the entire human body and if our immune systems arent strong enough we will die in fact infectious disease has regularly wiped out millions of people across the planet In this episode Michael explores our earliest attempts to tackle infection and reveals the moment we began to harness the power of microbes to fight back This is the story of how scientists chemists and

Michael ends the series with a look at poisons exploring the incredible turning points when we went from finding antidotes to poisons to applying them as a cure celebrating the eccentrics and mavericks whose breakthroughs were to pave the way for some of the most striking treatments of modern medicine Of the medicines explored in this series those that are derived from poisons are perhaps the