The Greatest Benefit to Mankind - Softcover

Roy Porter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006374549 ISBN 13: 9780006374541

Publisher: HarperCollins UK, 1999

Synopsis

Set to become the standard work on the history of medicine, this book is also a treasure trove of historical surprises. Roy Porter shows how lemons did as much as Nelson to defeat Napoleon and how African slaves became immune to malaria.

About this title

Review:

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. With all the capabilities of modern medicine's practicioners, however, we as a people are as worried about our health as ever.

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. But delve into its pages, and you'll find one marvelous bit of history after another. 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. Francis Willis's curing of The Madness of King George, W. T. G. 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). 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.

From the Publisher:

"The Greatest Benefit to Mankind" was shortlisted for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle General Nonfiction Award.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0006374549
• ISBN 13: 9780006374541
• Binding: Paperback