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Books : The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity

  


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The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity
by: Roy Porter

List Price: £19.99
Off The Bookshelf's Price: £13.99
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Used Price: £12.43
Third Party New Price: £12.28
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 610
EAN: 9780006374541
ISBN: 0006374549
Label: Fontana Press
Manufacturer: Fontana Press
Number Of Pages: 700
Publication Date: February 01, 1999
Publisher: Fontana Press
Studio: Fontana Press
Sales Rank: 2920

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Editorial Review:

Amazon.co.uk 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 practitioners, however, we as a people are as worried about our health as ever.

Roy Porter, a social historian of medicine at London's Wellcome Institute, has written a 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 marvellous piece of history after another. The obvious highlights are touched upon--Hippocrates introduces his oath, Pasteur homogenises, Jonas Salk produces the polio vaccine and so on--but there's also Dr. Francis Willis' curing of the madness of King George III, W.T.G. Morton's aggressive 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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Dual purpose book well written interesting read for anyone.
I have had this book since it was first published and it has been worth it's weight (considerable) in gold. I was nursing at the time so obviously had an interest in the medical side. However, this is an excellant history book and of interest to those who like to find out odd facts or the roots of colloquialisms.
It is so interesting it hooks you into actually reading all of it. I have, so has my daughter and my best friend (also a nurse).
However, it is factually correct and written well enough to be deemed a suitable source for academic studies. So after reading it for pleasure I found it was a recommended course book for a module in my Health & Social Policy degree. My friend has also delved into it again for her Nursing Studies ... Read More:


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - A great all round history of medicine
This book balances the social history with the anecdotes that bring the history of medicine alive It's incredibly dense and stands a lot of rereading an excellent history of medicine with fascinating looks at some often neglected areas such as Jewish and Arabic medicine of the Middle Ages

 



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