Blood And Guts A Short History Of Medicine

Author : Roy Porter
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393243346
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine written by Roy Porter and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-06-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.

Author : Roy Porter
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141932333
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blood and Guts written by Roy Porter and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2003-06-26 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Roy Porter
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393325695
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine written by Roy Porter and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-06-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the history of medicine, including the role of doctors, various attempts at controlling disease, and the progress of hospitals.

Author : Erwin H. Ackerknecht
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421419556
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Short History of Medicine written by Erwin H. Ackerknecht and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2016-05-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Richard Hollingham
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 1429987324
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blood and Guts written by Richard Hollingham and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-12-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : David J. Rothman
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813521909
Total Pages : 468 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Medicine and Western Civilization written by David J. Rothman and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fabulous anthology is sure to be a core text for history of medicine and social science classes in colleges across the country. In order to demonstrate how medical research has influenced Western cultural perspectives, the editors have collected original works from 61 different authors around nine major themes (among them "Anatomy and Destiny," "Psyche and Soma," and "The Construction of Pain, Suffering, and Death"). The authors range from Aristotle, the Bible, and Louis Pasteur, to Masters and Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, and Simone de Beauvoir. The primary sources selected to illustrate the themes are well chosen and contrast with each other nicely. However, the brief background material for the selections center around the authors and offer little or no discussion about the selections' relevance to the topics at hand. This book would be best read in a class or group where the texts' meaning in relation to each other can be discussed, but the book can stand alone if the reader is prepared to do some critical thinking.

Author : Druin Burch
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1407021222
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Taking the Medicine written by Druin Burch and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-01-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Doctors and patients alike trust the medical profession and its therapeutic powers; yet this trust has often been misplaced. Whether prescribing opium or thalidomide, aspirin or antidepressants, doctors have persistently failed to test their favourite ideas - often with catastrophic results. From revolutionary America to Nazi Germany and modern big-pharmaceuticals, this is the unexpected story of just how bad medicine has been, and of its remarkably recent effort to improve. It is the history of well-meaning doctors misled by intuition, of the startling human cost of their mistakes and of the exceptional individuals who have helped make things better. Alarming and optimistic, Taking the Medicine is essential reading for anyone interested in how and why to trust the pills they swallow.

Author : Roy Porter
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521864267
Total Pages : 11 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge History of Medicine written by Roy Porter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-05 with total page 11 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Roy Porter
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393242447
Total Pages : 874 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (The Norton History of Science) written by Roy Porter and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1999-10-17 with total page 874 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).

Author : Michael Kennedy
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780974946658
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Brief History of Disease, Science, and Medicine written by Michael Kennedy and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 23 informative chapters, Kennedy enlightens readers with scientific articles marking historical milestones in medical science. Written for medical students, young physicians, nurses, and anyone else interested in a broad view of the evolution of the medical profession, it includes 19 illustrations, over 500 footnotes and a 40-page index to assist the reader in searching for specific events and people from the past."--Book jacket.