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 by students in the history of medicine, medical students, historians, and medical professionals as well as all those seeking to understand the history of medicine.Covering the broad sweep of discoveries from parasitic worms to bacilli and x-rays, and...
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...
0Report
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...
0Report