A Short History of Medicine

by Erwin H. Ackerknecht

Book Overview

A bestselling history of medicine, enriched with a new foreword, concluding essay, and bibliographic essay. Erwin H. Ackerknecht's A Short History of Medicine is a concise narrative, long appreciated... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801827264
• Release Date: March 1982
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.8" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Big picture in a small frame

Although the emphasis here is on "short," Erwin Ackerknecht's history contains plenty for both the naïve reader who knows next to nothing about the progress of medical science and for the better educated reader who may know a lot about medicine (even be a qualified physician) but who may not know so much about how his expertise developed through time and space. At the rate of about 10 years per page, Ackerknecht hits only the high points, but his goal is rather to let those illustrate a series of philosophical points. An incomplete list includes: 1. The move from whole body sickness to what Ackerknecht calls localism. In primitive minds, sickness was not a defect of an organ like the liver but of the personality. 2. Consequently, the cause of sickness was not organic defect but immorality or sin. 3. Physiology had to precede diagnosis, which was mere symptomatology until the functions of organs could be determined. 4. Nevertheless, astute clinicians were able to provide effective treatment. 5. Public health measures and epidemics both arose from the same factor: agglomeration of large numbers of people in small spaces. (The same applies to animals, although Ackerknecht seldom mentions veterinary medicine, and to plants, although he never mentions diseases of plants.) 6. The separation of medicine and surgery for many centuries had a pernicious effect on both. 7. Up to sometime in the 15th century, the various medical traditions (of Europe, India, America, China, the Moslem lands) were different but about equal. If anything, Europe lagged behind, having regressed from a peak achieved by the Greeks in Roman Empire days. The European adoption of the experimental method left all other traditions in the dust. 8. The Enlightenment levered European medicine up to a new, higher level. Although some Romantic impulses were damaging, the Enlightenment concepts of progress made medicine more humane and more effective. 9. The advance of medicine has not been linear. Even as late as 1980 (when the 1955 original was revised), some aspects of the old humoral theory, long discredited by laboratory medicine, were proving of value; and, similarly, localism was not the last word, as physicians were again learning that approaching the whole body could be effective. Ackerknecht often scolds dogmatists. The title could easily have been "A Short History of Effective Medicine." Ackerknecht was very much a positivist. The actual course of medicine was retrograde and crazy in much of its history. Ackerknecht barely mentions quacks, although in the last paragraphs of the revision he takes an uncharacteristically dark turn: "Paradoxically, doctors have not become more popular through their improved means of helping. The perennial ambivalence of the patient, always in search of a scapegoat, has, with the help of quacks, politicians and sensation-mongering news media, increased. . . . The beautiful dream of the Enlightenment -- that with the growth of science,

Interesting, Informative, Easy to Read

This is a very interesting and informative history of medicine--concise, sequential, and easy to read. Ackerknecht starts with the diseases found in early life forms, then reptiles, mammals, and primitive man. He then goes into early civilizations, such as Egyptian and Babylonian, making the point that early medicine had a supernatural basis as it was believed spirits caused disease and such things as magical incantations by medicine men cured them. The advent of ancient Greek medicine brought a more rational, scientific approach as the body was thought to consist of 4 humors and disease caused by imbalance. Hippocrates, the most prominent physician of the time, was known for his objective observations and high ethical standards. With the Middle Ages medicine fell into the hands of the clergy and once again returned to the idea of evil spirits causing disease and saints and religious rites needed to cure them. The Renaissance saw the breakthrough of a return to scientific, rational thought and major discoveries followed, such as Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, which led to many other important new knowledges. As the book nears its end, Ackerknecht discusses the influence of clinical schools, the great strides made by microbiology, as well as the gains made in surgery. When he concludes with the trends of the twentieth century, the reader has a new appreciation of how far we have come from the beginnings of medicine, and how valiant a struggle man has waged against the diseases which have always plagued him. Comprehensive, yet not overly technical, this book is for the layman as well as the medical student.