The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (The Norton History of Science)
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
"A panoramic and perfectly magnificent intellectual history of medicine…This is the book that delivers it all." —Sherwin Nuland, author of How We Die
Hailed as "a remarkable achievement" (Boston Globe) and as "a triumph: simultaneously entertaining and instructive, witty and thought-provoking…a splendid and thoroughly engrossing book" (Los Angeles Times), Roy Porter's charting of the history of medicine affords us an opportunity as never before to assess its culture and science and its costs and benefits to mankind. Porter explores medicine's evolution against the backdrop of the wider religious, scientific, philosophical, and political beliefs of the culture in which it develops, covering ground from the diseases of the hunter-gatherers to the more recent threats of AIDS and Ebola, from the clearly defined conviction of the Hippocratic oath to the muddy ethical dilemmas of modern-day medicine. Offering up a treasure trove of historical surprises along the way, this book "has instantly become the standard single-volume work in its field" (The Lancet).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Porter's magisterial chronicle of medical thinking and practice deserves the popularity of his bestselling London: A Social History. Neither demonizing nor glorifying modern high-tech medicine, his epic history underscores the enormous progress achieved when Western medical science, by dint of anatomical and physiological investigations beginning in the Renaissance, broke decisively with the world's traditional medical systems--ancient Greek, Chinese, Indian Ayurvedic, herbalism, and the like--which viewed health as a precarious balance among the body, the universe and society. At the same time, he is nonjudgmental, examining each healing system on its own terms for possible value today. Although the scope of Porter's account of physicians, theories, advances and diseases can be daunting, he leavens his presentation with allusions to Moliere, Boccaccio, Swift, Pepys and Maugham, and extends his analysis of medicine's social dimensions to patient-doctor relations, medical responses to insanity, the influx of women healers into a male monopoly, the politics of public health and the intertwining of medicine with colonization, conquest, urban growth and religion. Finally, he weights the breakthroughs of the last 50 years in genetics, immunology, bacteriology and psychopharmacology against a record of disastrous drugs, iatrogenic (physician-induced) illness, medicalization of normal events, unequal access to health care, emerging lethal viral diseases and the intractability of chronic disorders. His diagnoses: modern medicine urgently needs to redefine its goals and priorities. Written with storytelling flair and erudition, this study will be of interest to laypersons and professionals alike. Porter is a professor of the social history of medicine in London. Illustrated.
