(Presumably they worked on the principle that they were a serious mood-killer.) And in general, you're left with a strong impression of quite how slow and painstaking progress has been: every basic drug and vitamin pill today, every vaccination and course of antibiotics, is founded on a centuries-long, incremental advance in knowledge that often took several steps backwards for every shuffle forwards. Things have certainly come a long way since – to pick an example almost at random from the early pages – doctors were recommending crocodile-dung pessaries as a form of contraception, as they were in Pharaonic Egypt. There are delights aplenty to be mined in this compendious history, and a myriad reasons, if you still needed any, to fall down on your knees and give thanks that we live in an age of anaesthetic and antibiotics. The defects of this book are many, but it would hurt to give it less than four stars and, the avoidance of pain being one of Porter's main themes, I will stick to a suitably thematic rating. Along the way the book offers up a treasure trove of historical surprises: how the ancient Egyptians treated incipient baldness with a mixture of hippopotamus, lion, crocodile, goose, snake, and ibex fat how a mystery epidemic devastated ancient Athens and brought an end to the domination of that great city: how lemons did as much as Nelson to defeat Napoleon: how yellow fever, carried by African mosquitoes to the Americas, led the French to fail utterly in their attempts to recover Haiti after the slave revolt of 1790: and how the explorers of the South Seas brought both syphilis to Tahiti and tuberculosis and measles to the Maoris."-Jacket.
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.
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