The greatest benefit to mankind : a medical history of humanity / Roy Porter

Object Details

Author

Porter, Roy 1946-2002

British ed. published with subtitle: A medical history of humanity from antiquity to the present.

Contents

Introduction -- The roots of medicine -- Antiquity -- Medicine and faith -- The medieval west -- Indian medicine -- Chinese medicine -- Renaissance -- The new science -- Enlightenment -- Scientific medicine in the nineteenth century -- Nineteenth-century medical care -- Public medicine -- From Pasteur to penicillin -- Tropical medicine, world diseases -- Psychiatry -- Medical research -- Clinical science -- Surgery -- Medicine, state and society -- Medicine and the people -- The past, the present and the future

Summary

"Roy Porter explores medicine's evolution against the backdrop of the wider religious, scientific, philosophical, and political beliefs of the culture in which it develops, and he shows how our need to understand where diseases come from and what we can do to control them has - perhaps above all elseinspired developments in medicine through the ages. He charts the remarkable rise of modern medical science - the emergence of specialties such as anatomy, physiology, neurology, and bacteriology - as well as the accompanying development of wider medical practice at the bedside, in the hospital, and in the ambitious public health systems of the twentieth century. Along the way the book offers up a treasure trove of historical surprises: 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 an end to the domination of that great city: how lemons did as much as Nelson to defeat Napoleon: how yellow fever, carried by African mosquitoes to the Americas, led the French to fail utterly in their attempts to recover Haiti after the slave revolt of 1790: and how the explorers of the South Seas brought both syphilis to Tahiti and tuberculosis and measles to the Maoris."--Jacket.

1997

1998, ©1997

Type

Books

History

Physical description

xvi, 831 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Smithsonian Libraries

Topic

Medicine--History

Social medicine--History

Record ID

siris_sil_554532

Metadata Usage (text)

CC0