Covers those individuals involved in clinical medicine, surgery, and related biomedical sciences, such as biochemistry, biophysics, physiology, pharmacology, and genetics.
This text, written by members of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine and first published in 1995, is designed to cover the history of western medicine from classical antiquity to 1800. As one guiding thread it takes, as its title suggests, the system of medical ideas that in large part went back to the Greeks of the eighth century BC, and played a major role in the understanding and treatment of health and disease. Its influence spread from the Aegean basin to the rest of the Mediterranean region, to Europe, and then to European settlements overseas. By the nineteenth century, however, this tradition no longer carried the same force or occupied so central a position within medicine. This book charts the influence of this tradition, examining it in its social and historical context. It is essential reading as a synthesis for all students of the history of medicine.
Profiling more than 1400 print and electronic sources, this book helps connect librarians and researchers to the most relevant sources of information in genealogy and biography.
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize "A panoramic and perfectly magnificent intellectual history of medicine…This is the book that delivers it all." —Sherwin Nuland, author of How We Die Hailed as "a remarkable achievement" (Boston Globe) and as "a triumph: simultaneously entertaining and instructive, witty and thought-provoking…a splendid and thoroughly engrossing book" (Los Angeles Times), Roy Porter's charting of the history of medicine affords us an opportunity as never before to assess its culture and science and its costs and benefits to mankind. Porter explores medicine's evolution against the backdrop of the wider religious, scientific, philosophical, and political beliefs of the culture in which it develops, covering ground from the diseases of the hunter-gatherers to the more recent threats of AIDS and Ebola, from the clearly defined conviction of the Hippocratic oath to the muddy ethical dilemmas of modern-day medicine. Offering up a treasure trove of historical surprises along the way, this book "has instantly become the standard single-volume work in its field" (The Lancet).
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine celebrates the richness and variety of medical history around the world. In recent decades, the history of medicine has emerged as a rich and mature sub-discipline within history, but the strength of the field has not precluded vigorous debates about methods, themes, and sources. Bringing together over thirty international scholars, this handbook provides a constructive overview of the current state of these debates, and offers new directions for future scholarship. There are three sections: the first explores the methodological challenges and historiographical debates generated by working in particular historical ages; the second explores the history of medicine in specific regions of the world and their medical traditions, and includes discussion of the `global history of medicine'; the final section analyses, from broad chronological and geographical perspectives, both established and emerging historical themes and methodological debates in the history of medicine.