As an adolescent, I would have lapped up the doom-ridden clichés of Liam Shaw’s introduction. For a decade or two afterwards, I would simply not have noticed them. Experience has made me more easily irritated. The apocalyptic drum rolls with which Shaw starts are wearily familiar. They are also needless, for once they recede what follows is a work of clarity and lyricism.

Although a history of antibiotics, Dangerous Miracle is a critique of capitalism too. Engels sets the tone: he is quoted in the book’s epigraph declaring we flatter ourselves by thinking we have conquered nature, since ‘each such conquest takes revenge on us’. Shaw, who has written on science for the Morning Star, calls the pharmaceutical industry ‘a form of organised crime’. The bulk of his book, though, presents a different picture. Patent law, intellectual property, government pump-priming of research, efforts to defend the market against the creation of monopolies – all of these emerge as essential to a society’s development of new drugs. 

The book’s subtitle, with its statement that we have ‘burned through’ our supply of antibiotics, creates a sense of perilous excitement. It, however, has the mild disadvantage of being untrue. I have been a doctor for decades. Antibiotic resistance is unquestionably a problem: diagnostic samples from my patients frequently show