The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity

by Roy Porter

Book Overview

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,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393319806
• ISBN13: 9780393319804
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 872 Pages
• Weight: 2.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Simply the Best History of Medicine

This wonderful book by Roy Porter is simply the best available history of medicine. It is long and detailed, as befits a huge topic. It is Eurocentric, as is most of modern medicine. It stresses the scientific origins of the development of modern medicine. While doing all of these things, it remains a very readable book. Porter's writing style is lucid and at times entertaining -- quite welcome attributes in a tome on the history of medicine. Having waded through other histories of medicine, I believe this is the best. And the paperback version is a wonderful bargain!

My Best Buy this year!

This is a magnificent overview of the history of disease and medicine from antiquity to the modern age. Porter writes with humour and insight, selecting carefully from the abundance of evidence the significant moments and figures. Both fascinating and informative this book is also extremely good value with its 718 pages, plus bibliography and index. This is my best buy for the year.

Very insightful book on the social aspects of medicine

This book is a very pleasant and worth reading. It provokes the reader almost on every page because the author was one of the most thoughtful scholars and professors of history of medicine. This masterpiece presents the reader with a very sharp and honest description of the origins and development of Western medicine, obscure and not as heroic or mytical as some would like to believe. This book remits the reader to key questions about the frailty of human health and the stablishment of medicine as science late in human history. The author's style is definitely thought provoking and may be disturbing to some that would prefer to think of Medicine not as a coordinate social struggle preventing and fighting disease with weapons like penicillin, a drug no more than fifty-years old, but maybe rather as an extremely high-tech panacea. Medicine, regardless its Western or Oriental basis, relays upon clever, respectful and humble physicians preventing maladies and treating patients and their suffering, not only diseases.

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.

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.