Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #162618 in Books
• Published on: 1997-11-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 700 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Samuel Johnson once called the medical profession "the greatest benefit to mankind." In the 20th century, the quality of that benefit has improved more and more rapidly than at any other comparable time in history. With all the capabilities of modern medicine's practitioners, however, we as a people are as worried about our health as ever.

Roy Porter, a social historian of medicine at London's Wellcome Institute, has written a dauntingly thick history of how medical thinking and practice has risen to the challenges of disease through the centuries. But delve into its pages and you'll find one marvellous piece of history after another. The obvious highlights are touched upon--Hippocrates introduces his oath, Pasteur homogenises, Jonas Salk produces the polio vaccine and so on--but there's also Dr. Francis Willis' curing of the madness of King George III, W.T.G. Morton's aggressive use of ether in surgery and research on digestion conducted using a man with a stomach fistula (if you don't know what that means, you may not want to know). Porter is straightforward about his deliberate focus on Western medical traditions, citing their predominant influence on global medicine, and with The Greatest Benefit to Mankind he has produced a volume worthy of that tradition's legacy.

Synopsis
Medicine advances ever faster, and with it not just a capacity to overcome sickness, but to transform the very nature of life. Starting in ancient antiquity, this text charts how this health revolution came about and how life for human beings in the West has ceased, in Hobbes' memorable phrase, to be "nasty, brutish and short." Porter plots the growth of medical specialisms - pharmacology, physiology, anatomy, neurology, bacteriology - and the institutions of medicine - the hospital and asylum - to show how medical advances have often created as many problems as they have solved. The book also shows how the ancient Egyptians treated incipient baldness with a mixture of hippopotamus, lion, crocodile, goose, snake and ibex fat; how a mystery epidemic devastated ancient Athens and brought to an end the domination of that great city; and how lemons did as much as Nelson to defeat Napolean.

Customer Reviews

Dual purpose book well written interesting read for anyone.
I have had this book since it was first published and it has been worth it's weight (considerable) in gold. I was nursing at the time so obviously had an interest in the medical side. However, this is an excellant history book and of interest to those who like to find out odd facts or the roots of colloquialisms.
It is so interesting it hooks you into actually reading all of it. I have, so has my daughter and my best friend (also a nurse).
However, it is factually correct and written well enough to be deemed a suitable source for academic studies. So after reading it for pleasure I found it was a recommended course book for a module in my Health & Social Policy degree. My friend has also delved into it again for her Nursing Studies degree.
This is a book that you keep and visit now and again, not like other academic texts that you cannot wait to sell on the Marketplace.

A great all round history of medicine
This book balances the social history with the anecdotes that bring the history of medicine alive It's incredibly dense and stands a lot of rereading an excellent history of medicine with fascinating looks at some often neglected areas such as Jewish and Arabic medicine of the Middle Ages

History of medicine for the general reader
This book encompasses the broad sweep of the history of medical discovery and medical care from the earliest times and illuminates the story with accounts of scientific method explained in layman's terms and illustrated with anecdotes that range from the revelatory to the highly entertaining. Quite a heavy tome but unputdownable none the less.