Doctors
The Biography of Medicine
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the author of How We Die, the extraordinary story of the development of modern medicine, told through the lives of the physician-scientists who paved the way.
How does medical science advance? Popular historians would have us believe that a few heroic individuals, possessing superhuman talents, lead an unselfish quest to better the human condition. But as renowned Yale surgeon and medical historian Sherwin B. Nuland shows in this brilliant collection of linked life portraits, the theory bears little resemblance to the truth. Through the centuries, the men and women who have shaped the world of medicine have been not only very human, but also very much the products of their own times and places. Presenting compelling studies of great medical innovators and pioneers, Doctors gives us a fascinating history of modern medicine. Ranging from the legendary Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, to Andreas Vesalius, whose Renaissance masterwork on anatomy offered invaluable new insight into the human body, to Helen Taussig, founder of pediatric cardiology and co-inventor of the original "blue baby" operation, here is a volume filled with the spirit of ideas and the thrill of discovery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
To tell the story of medicine since Hippocrates and Galen, Nuland, a surgeon and faculty member of the Yale School of Medicine, focuses on the personalities and careers of medical innovators since the 16th century who epitomized the scientific climate and culture of their period. His enthusiastic and anecdote-rich narrative ranges from Vesalius, whose magnificently illustrated text on anatomy reflected the Renaissance rediscovery of the human body, to Barnard's high-tech heart transplants and other organ-replacement surgery of today. Medical landmarks include Harvey's charting of the circulatory system, Laennec's invention of the diagnostic stethoscope, and the discovery of germs and antisepsis by Pasteur and Lister. Nuland also notes contributions by Americans (Halsted and Cushing among them), as well as advances in transfusions, anesthesia, medical training and surgery. Having documented the transition of doctors from personal healers to reductionist technicians concerned primarily with disease, he welcomes efforts by today's physicians to return to a more humanistic approach.
