The Tin Woodsman, Dick Cheney was given a new heart and the scarecrow, Joe Biden, was allowed to keep his brain. (He had an aneurysm that bled). But we don’t live in Oz and there is no wizard. The book starts in the late 1700s when only a few eccentrics believed the world was full of invisible creatures that made us sick. It tells the stories of two centuries of research, disease, and care (including HIV, transplantation and CRISPR) and it ends when John Cain turning down his thumb and allowing doctors to continue to heal the blind and lame. Along the way it traces man’s remarkable accomplishments and the gradual creation of a care system that is too often outrageously expensive and a topic of political debate.