Product Description

Hailed as "a remarkable achievement" (Boston Sunday 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 today's threat 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 Greatest Benefit to Mankind was a finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a New York Times Notable Book of 1998.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40424 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 872 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780393319804
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com 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 Library Journal
Porter examines what healers have done and the impact of their ideas and actions. His focus is on Western medicine "because Western medicine has developed in ways which made it uniquely powerful and...uniquely global." (LJ 2/15/98)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New England Journal of Medicine
There has not been a book of this scope since Garrison's An Introduction to the History of Medicine (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders), the fourth edition of which appeared in 1929. In reviving the single-authored, encyclopedic, universal history, Roy Porter seeks to make serviceable for the 21st-century reader a model that ultimately derives from the positivistic German medical handbuch of the 19th century. That he has mixed success is probably due more to the way readers and writers have changed than to any deficiencies on his part.

Best known for his prolific contributions to the social history of medicine, especially the history of popular healers and mental illness, Porter here demonstrates a confident familiarity with the "great doctors" and much else. Although discussions of the former constitute the core of the book, discussions of the latter are substantive and brilliantly condensed and conveyed. Porter's recurrent examinations of epidemiology, public health and demography, medical institutions, the social role of medicine and its practitioners, women and medicine, and treatment of mental disorders at various periods reveal admirably how medical historiography has broadened and deepened since Garrison's era.

Nearly half the text of this book follows a chronologic course from prehistoric times to the end of the 18th century (including surveys of Islamic, Indian, and Chinese medicine), whereas the past two centuries are approached thematically and, as Porter acknowledges, selectively. There are chapters on "Medicine, State, and Society" and "Medicine and the People," as well as chapters dealing with medical practice and research.

Throughout the book, Porter presents masterly introductory and concluding summaries of each section in a fluent, often amusing, and sometimes irreverent style. The text is enlivened by numerous quotes from lay and medical contemporaries. Although respecting his universalist goal, Porter explains that Western medicine receives the most attention because it has largely triumphed around the world, and he draws the majority of his historical case examples of professional and social developments from Great Britain (his own area of research).

What, then, are the problems with The Greatest Benefit to Mankind? The apparently few factual errors (several with respect to Vesalius, and the erroneous statement that Dr. Guillotin invented the instrument named after him), which are inevitable in such an ambitious survey, do not pose a serious problem, nor does the judicious coverage and balanced interpretation of medical history. Instead, as the extremely informative 45-page list of further readings (usefully rated by Porter with stars for those he has found most helpful) indicates, the problem is that medical historiography, particularly since around 1980, has experienced such a boom in quantity, quality, and diversity that no single-volume total history can hope to do more than briefly summarize while pointing the reader toward more extensive sources. Although readable, this book is dauntingly crammed with information that moves by at a rapid clip. It is likely to overwhelm the novice but hold few surprises for the specialist. It will probably find its greatest use as a modern, comprehensive, and reliable reference work, a point of entry to the literature and a valuable aid to those teaching the subject.

Reviewed by Toby Gelfand, Ph.D.
Copyright © 1998 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

Customer Reviews

More a European History
This is the second review of three I have done of socio-medical histories written of edited by Roy Porter (you can read the others on my reivew page). I read and compared this to The "Cambridge Illustrated History: Medicine", and "Gout, the Patrician Maladay". I thought this was the best approach as people might be like me, looking for a reference work to buy and trying to toss up between which one to get and what the advantages and disadvantages of one over another.

In terms of content I think this is the more comprehensive of the two general reference works. It is over twice the length of Cambridge (over 800 pages in this one compared to not quite 400). It also doesn't have pages taken up with illustrations as Cambridge does. That is probably the thing I like least about this book, there are only three small sections in the middle with some black and white pictures reproduced - I think on comparison I do prefer the slightly more expensive version of having pictures on the pages I am reading for this kind of reference work.

The book is divided into 22 chapters which follow the rise of Western medicine more or less chronologically. There are also chapters included on Chinese and Indian Medicine, but expect the emphasis to be European in both history and development. Each chapter is divided into specific topics which are discussed a structure I quite enjoyed as it broke up the text and made it more readable.

I looked up some specific subjects to compare this with the Cambrige work and in each case (among them Purperal fever, Galen, Resurrectionists) this book had far more detailed and comprehensive explanations, often citing broad statistics. However writing the a social and medical history of mankind is difficult to do full justice even in 800-some pages. It does give a slightly provide more detail but I wasn't really sure that the slightly greater detail was that much of an advantage to make up for the loss of illustration. In the end this is still only slightly more detail on broad trends rather than in-depth discussion. He does cover some people and subjects not dealt with in "Cambridge" including people like Dr James Barry, the first female surgeon (although she was masquerading as a man at the time) - but of course the space available doesn't allow Porter to discuss any of her other significant work as, in terms of forwarding the field of medicine, she was not earth-shattering.

Porter has a very good-natured and readable style of writing though and I really enjoyed it. He breaks this chapters up into short sections and interspeses them with rather nice jokes for instance on page 129 he writes of 'Trotula'said to be a female of 12th century medical school in Salerno but says " 'Dame Trot' was more likely a male writing in drag."

So while I very much enjoyed the book and would certainly have no qualms in recommending it to read at all, I do hold some reservations about it - but strictly in comparison with what else is available.

Superb Medical History in One Volume
Until recently, when asked by his students for an up-to-date, readable, one-volume history of medicine, Roy Porter was at a loss of what to recommend. He therefore decided to bridge the gap, so to speak, and undertake this momentous task himself. In so far as it is possible for someone to adequately accomplish this Herculean task of being both comprehensive and somewhat concise (the material is indeed covered in one volume, though 831 pages long), Roy Porter has succeeded.

Porter has an eye for the unusual, spicing up his reporting with examples of odd concoctions and practices used for various maladies down through the ages, such as the use of pulverized crocodile dung, various herbs, and honey as a contraceptive pessary among the ancient Egyptians, or the English resistance against legal revisions (including town sewer reform among other things) attempting to fight cholera in the 19th century: "We prefer to take our chances with cholera and the rest rath! er than be bullied into health," reported THE TIMES. Most refreshingly, he is not timid in rendering pronouncements for both good and ill on the medical profession, bringing a candor needed to assess the impact of medicine down through the ages. He is thorough without being tedious, educational without being pedantic, and has a fine eye for comedy without being flippant.

As someone with an interest in history and by vocation a surgeon, I found Roy Porter's book a delightfully instructive volume to read. I look forward to returning to peruse it many times in the years ahead.

A landmark for historical writing
This book delievers what it was written to deliever. It wasn't meant to be a brain candy, witty, clever, majestic, novel that makes the common person rush out to apply to medical school. It is going to seem "boring" if you don't want to LEARN about THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE. An excellent book preceding this to read would be "Guns, Germs, and Steel," by Jared Diamond to put things in a solid historical reality. This book is five stars, but be ready to engage yourself with the text, buy a highlighter if it helps you concentrate, go back to college, pretend you need to get an A in the History of Western Medicine, because you will have an A+ perspective on medicine if you keep the correct perspective regarding this book.