Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine

Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine PDF Author: Roy Porter
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393243346
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
"Ideas tumble out of Porter like wonders from some scholarly horn of plenty." —Sherwin B. Nuland, The New Republic An eminently readable, entertaining romp through the history of our vain and valiant efforts to heal ourselves. Mankind's battle to stay alive and healthy for as long as possible is our oldest, most universal struggle. With his characteristic wit and vastly informed historical scope, Roy Porter examines the war fought between disease and doctors on the battleground of the flesh from ancient times to the present. He explores the many ingenious ways in which we have attempted to overcome disease through the ages: the changing role of doctors, from ancient healers, apothecaries, and blood-letters to today's professionals; the array of drugs, from Ayurvedic remedies to the launch of Viagra; the advances in surgery, from amputations performed by barbers without anesthetic to today's sophisticated transplants; and the transformation of hospitals from Christian places of convalescence to modern medical powerhouses. Cleverly illustrated with historic line drawings, the chronic ailments of humanity provide vivid anecdotes for Porter's enlightening story of medicine's efforts to prevail over a formidable and ever-changing adversary.

Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine

Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine PDF Author: Roy Porter
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393243346
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Ideas tumble out of Porter like wonders from some scholarly horn of plenty." —Sherwin B. Nuland, The New Republic An eminently readable, entertaining romp through the history of our vain and valiant efforts to heal ourselves. Mankind's battle to stay alive and healthy for as long as possible is our oldest, most universal struggle. With his characteristic wit and vastly informed historical scope, Roy Porter examines the war fought between disease and doctors on the battleground of the flesh from ancient times to the present. He explores the many ingenious ways in which we have attempted to overcome disease through the ages: the changing role of doctors, from ancient healers, apothecaries, and blood-letters to today's professionals; the array of drugs, from Ayurvedic remedies to the launch of Viagra; the advances in surgery, from amputations performed by barbers without anesthetic to today's sophisticated transplants; and the transformation of hospitals from Christian places of convalescence to modern medical powerhouses. Cleverly illustrated with historic line drawings, the chronic ailments of humanity provide vivid anecdotes for Porter's enlightening story of medicine's efforts to prevail over a formidable and ever-changing adversary.

Blood and Guts

Blood and Guts PDF Author: Roy Porter
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141932333
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Mankind's battle to stay alive is the greatest of all subjects. This brief, witty and unusual book by Britain's greatest medical historian compresses into a tiny span a lifetime spent thinking about millennia of human ingenuity in the quest to cheat death. Each chapter sums up one of these battlefields (surgery, doctors, disease, hospitals, laboratories and the human body) in a way that is both frightening and elating. Startlingly illustrated, A SHORT HISTORY OF MEDICINE is the ideal presentfor anyone who is keenly aware of their own mortality and wants to do something about it. It is also a wonderful memorial to one of Penguin's greatest historians.

Blood and Guts

Blood and Guts PDF Author: Roy Porter
Publisher: Allan Lane
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Mankind's battle to stay alive and healthy for as long as possible is our oldest, most universal and formidable struggle. This witty and often shocking book explores the ingenious ways in which we have fought disease over the ages in our quest for immortality. Roy Porter examines the changing role of doctors, from ancient healers, apothecaries and blood-letters to today's professionals; looks at the drugs we have used, from Ayurvedic remedies to the launch of Viagra in 1998; follows the huge advances in surgery, from amputations performed by barbers without anaesthetic to today's sophisticated transplants; and shows how hospitals have been transformed from Christian places of convalescence to modern medical powerhouses.

A Short History of Medicine

A Short History of Medicine PDF Author: Erwin H. Ackerknecht
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421419556
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
A bestselling history of medicine, enriched with a new foreword, concluding essay, and bibliographic essay. Erwin H. Ackerknecht’s A Short History of Medicine is a concise narrative, long appreciated by students in the history of medicine, medical students, historians, and medical professionals as well as all those seeking to understand the history of medicine. Covering the broad sweep of discoveries from parasitic worms to bacilli and x-rays, and highlighting physicians and scientists from Hippocrates and Galen to Pasteur, Koch, and Roentgen, Ackerknecht narrates Western and Eastern civilization’s work at identifying and curing disease. He follows these discoveries from the library to the bedside, hospital, and laboratory, illuminating how basic biological sciences interacted with clinical practice over time. But his story is more than one of laudable scientific and therapeutic achievement. Ackerknecht also points toward the social, ecological, economic, and political conditions that shape the incidence of disease. Improvements in health, Ackerknecht argues, depend on more than laboratory knowledge: they also require that we improve the lives of ordinary men and women by altering social conditions such as poverty and hunger. This revised and expanded edition includes a new foreword and concluding biographical essay by Charles E. Rosenberg, Ackerknecht’s former student and a distinguished historian of medicine. A new bibliographic essay by Lisa Haushofer explores recent scholarship in the history of medicine.

Blood and Guts

Blood and Guts PDF Author: Richard Hollingham
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429987324
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Today, astonishing surgical breakthroughs are making limb transplants, face transplants, and a host of other previously un dreamed of operations possible. But getting here has not been a simple story of medical progress. In Blood and Guts, veteran science writer Richard Hollingham weaves a compelling narrative from the key moments in surgical history. We have a ringside seat in the operating theater of University College Hospital in London as world-renowned Victorian surgeon Robert Liston performs a remarkable amputation in thirty seconds—from first cut to final stitch. Innovations such as Joseph Lister's antiseptic technique, the first open-heart surgery, and Walter Freeman's lobotomy operations, among other breakthroughs, are brought to life in these pages in vivid detail. This is popular science writing at it's best.

The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine

The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine PDF Author: Roy Porter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521002523
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
An authoritative and accessible illustrated introduction to medical history.

History of Medicine

History of Medicine PDF Author: Jacalyn Duffin
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802095569
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
Jacalyn Duffin's History of Medicine has for ten years been one of the leading texts used to teach medical and nursing students the history of their profession. It has also been widely used in history courses and by general readers. An accessible overview of medical history, this new edition is greatly expanded, including more information on medicine in the United States, Great Britain, and in other European countries. The book continues to be organized conceptually around the major fields of medical endeavor such as anatomy, pharmacology, obstetrics, and psychiatry and has grown to include a new chapter on public health. Years of pedagogic experience, medical developments, and reader feedback have led to new sections throughout the book on topics including bioethics, forensics, genetics, reproductive technology, clinical trials, and recent outbreaks of BSE, West Nile Virus, SARS, and anthrax. Up to date and filled with pithy examples and teaching tools such as a searchable online bibliography, History of Medicine continues to demonstrate the power of historical research to inform current health care practice and enhance cultural understanding.

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (The Norton History of Science)

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (The Norton History of Science) PDF Author: Roy Porter
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393242447
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 874

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Book 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).

The Cambridge History of Medicine

The Cambridge History of Medicine PDF Author: Roy Porter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521864267
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Book Description
Against the backdrop of unprecedented concern for the future of health care, 'The Cambridge History of Medicine' surveys the rise of medicine in the West from classical times to the present. Covering both the social and scientific history of medicine, this volume traces the chronology of key developments and events.

The Invention of Surgery

The Invention of Surgery PDF Author: David Schneider
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643133896
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
Written by an author with plenty of experience holding a scalpel, Dr. David Schneider’s The Invention of Surgery is an in-depth biography of the practice that has leapt forward over the centuries from the dangerous guesswork of ancient Greek physicians through the world-changing developments of anesthesia and antiseptic operating rooms to the “implant revolution” of the twentieth century.The Invention of Surgery is history of surgery that explains this dramatic, world-changing progress and highlights the personalities of the discipline's most dynamic historical figures. It links together the lives of the pioneering scientists who first understood what causes disease and how surgery could powerfully intercede in people’s lives, and then shows how the rise of surgery intersected with many of the greatest medical breakthroughs of the last century. And as Schneider argues, surgery has not finished transforming; new technologies are constantly reinventing both the practice of surgery and the nature of the objects we are permanently implanting in our bodies. Schneider considers these latest developments, asking “What’s next?” and analyzing how our conception of surgery has changed alongside our evolving ideas of medicine, technology, and our bodies.