the greatest benefit to mankind by roy porter

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.

'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. 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 published with subtitle: A medical history of humanity from antiquity to the present Porter is straightforward about his deliberate focus on Western medical traditions, citing their predominant influence on global medicine, and with The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, he has produced a volume worthy of that tradition's legacy.British ed. Morton's hucksterish use of ether in surgery, and research on digestion conducted using a man with a stomach fistula (if you don't know what that means, you may not want to know). Francis Willis's curing of The Madness of King George, W. The obvious highlights are touched upon-Hippocrates introduces his oath, Pasteur homogenizes, Jonas Salk produces the polio vaccine, and so on-but there's also Dr. But delve into its pages, and you'll find one marvelous bit of history after another. Roy Porter, a social historian of medicine the London's Wellcome Institute, has written an dauntingly thick history of how medical thinking and practice has risen to the challenges of disease through the centuries. With all the capabilities of modern medicine's practicioners, however, we as a people are as worried about our health as ever.

Samuel Johnson once called the medical profession 'the greatest benefit to mankind.' In the 20th century, the quality of that benefit has improved more and more rapidly than at any other comparable time in history.

The greatest benefit to mankind by roy porter