Doctors


Book Description

From the author of How We Die, the extraordinary story of the development of modern medicine, told through the lives of the physician-scientists who paved the way. How does medical science advance? Popular historians would have us believe that a few heroic individuals, possessing superhuman talents, lead an unselfish quest to better the human condition. But as renowned Yale surgeon and medical historian Sherwin B. Nuland shows in this brilliant collection of linked life portraits, the theory bears little resemblance to the truth. Through the centuries, the men and women who have shaped the world of medicine have been not only very human, but also very much the products of their own times and places. Presenting compelling studies of great medical innovators and pioneers, Doctors gives us a fascinating history of modern medicine. Ranging from the legendary Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, to Andreas Vesalius, whose Renaissance masterwork on anatomy offered invaluable new insight into the human body, to Helen Taussig, founder of pediatric cardiology and co-inventor of the original "blue baby" operation, here is a volume filled with the spirit of ideas and the thrill of discovery.




Belly-Rippers, Surgical Innovation and the Ovariotomy Controversy


Book Description

This open access book looks at the dramatic history of ovariotomy, an operation to remove ovarian tumours first practiced in the early nineteenth century. Bold and daring, surgeons who performed it claimed to be initiating a new era of surgery by opening the abdomen. Ovariotomy soon occupied a complex position within medicine and society, as an operation which symbolised surgical progress, while also remaining at the boundaries of ethical acceptability. This book traces the operation’s innovation, from its roots in eighteenth-century pathology, through the denouncement of those who performed it as ‘belly-rippers’, to its rapid uptake in the 1880s, when ovariotomists were accused of over-operating. Throughout the century, the operation was never a hair’s breadth from controversy.







A Calculus of Suffering


Book Description

Analyzes the impact of anesthesia on nineteenth-century medicine, discusses the advantages and disadvantages of anesthesia, and explains how rules for its use were developed




On Their Own Terms


Book Description

In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.




The Codification of Medical Morality


Book Description

Like many novel ideas, the idea for this volume and its predecessor arose over lunch in the cafeteria of the old Wellcome Institute. On an atternoon in Sept- ber 1988, Dorothy and Roy Porter, and I, sketched out a plan for a set of conf- ences in which scholars from a variety of disciplines would explore the emergence of modern medical ethics in the English-speaking world: from its pre-history in the quarrels that arose as gentlemanly codes of etiquette and honor broke down under the pressure of the eighteenth-century "sick trade," to the Enlightenment ethics of John Gregory and Thomas Percival, to the American appropriation process that culminated in the American Medical Association's 1847 Code of Ethics, and to the British turn to medical jurisprudence in the 1858 Medical Act. Roy Porter formally presented our idea as a plan for two back-to-back c- ferences to the Wellcome Trust, and I presented it to the editors of the PHI- LOSOPHY AND MEDICINE series, H. Tristram Engeihardt, Jr. and Stuart Spicker. The reception from both parties was enthusiastic and so, with the financial backing of the former and a commitment to publication from the latter, Roy Porter, ably assisted by Frieda Hauser and Steven Emberton, - ganized two conferences. The first was held at the Wellcome Institute in - cember 1989; the second was sponsored by the Wellcome, but was actually held in the National Hospital, in December 1990.







Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1800


Book Description

Women have engaged in healing from the beginning of history, often within the context of the home. This book studies the role, contributions and challenges faced by women healers in France, Spain, Italy and England, including medical practice among women in the Jewish and Muslim communities, from the later Middle Ages to approximately 1800.