The underlying frame of this book is medicine, and in particular human disease. At every turn in the road, it is my desire and hope to impart some understanding of the ailments that plague our species-in as jargon-free way as possible. The overlying structure, however, as we travel disease by disease through the pages of this book, are the numerous jumping-off points, from which we will delve into the splendid history, mystery, and serendipity of science, the eddies and currents of human history, in all its splendor and all its tragedy, not to mention dips and dives into all that came before us, when humankind was just a gleam in evolution's eye.The great and prolific sci-fi writer Stephen King once said, "Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings." The translation being: stay on point and mercilessly throttle your little side stories and anecdotes, even if they're cute, because they don't add to, and in fact mostly distract from, the real story. I adore Stephen King but this book is precisely that, about those darlings. We won't forget about medicine, but you can forget that this narrative will stay on a straight and narrow path; we won't be killing these darlings. Instead, we'll journey to the top of Everest and into the center of the Earth, from the beginning of time to the unforgiving time of dogma, collecting every darling-from science, history, art, music, biology, chemistry, physics, math, astronomy, geology, geography, anthropology, archaeology, religion, you name it-we find. We'll cherish all those darlings that make up the human history that remains eternal in all of us.If the underlying frame of this book is medicine and the overlying structure is the jumping-off points into all our precious darlings, then the overarching roof on top of it all is made up of the personal anecdotes and vignettes threaded throughout its pages. When you're a physician who gets to my age (my precise age necessarily omitted because I can scarcely believe it myself), you've been in the trenches of medicine long enough to have seen a thing or two. These personal stories I hope show how while medical history can reveal the entire world to us, the practice of medicine is ultimately about valuing us each as individuals.Lewis Carroll's rather famous Alice in Wonderland (1865) includes this demand of the White Rabbit, when he is called to the witness stand to report on what he knows about who stole the Queen of Hearts' tarts: "Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop."Perhaps this is good advice for the White Rabbit and the mystery of the missing tarts, but the thing with medicine is this: it's not really just one simple frame but rather a huge expanse of interlocking frames, all of which have their own innumerable jumping-off points-and so first beginning at the beginning and then going on until the end is far too much to ask of a single book. Such a pursuit needs to be broken down into volumes-which is what I have done. You hold in your hands The First History of Man, the initial of a planned eight volumes. And the journey I invite you on in this first volume is this: a foray into the world of infection in general, and bacterial infections in particular, with darling visits with Cleopatra, Oscar Wilde, and a watch-wearing apple out in the emptiness of space along the way, all threaded together with two or three meaningful narratives from my own life. The jumping off adventures awaiting you in the second volume are built on viral, parasitic, fungal and sexually transmitted diseases, with further volumes covering heart and lung diseases, and so on and so forth, through eight volumes, accompanied again by overlying jumping-off points into darlings of science and history and an overarching personal story.