Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates Hardcover – July 20, 2006
Author: Visit Amazon's David Wootton Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0192803557 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates – July 20, 2006
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David Wootton is Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York. He has published widely in early modern intellectual history, particularly on the history of political thought, and is a regular reviewer for the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.
Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates – July 20, 2006
Download for free books Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates Hardcover – July 20, 2006 for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
Review
`Stimulating and unorthodox' Literary Review
`Anyone with an involvement with medicine - and that means anyone with a body and a brain - should read this brilliant, bracing and erudite book.' Seamus Sweeney, www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001084.php
A genuinely thrilling adventure...An emotionally and intellectually gripping drama.
Explosive new book..important book
`A very stimulating and thought provoking book' Theodore Dalrymple, Sunday Telegraph
`Lucid [and] elegantly written... an inspiring account of individual accomplishment' Will Cohu, Daily Telegraph
`Anyone with an involvement with medicine - and that means anyone with a body and a brain - should read this brilliant, bracing and erudite book.' Seamus Sweeney, www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001084.php
A genuinely thrilling adventure...An emotionally and intellectually gripping drama.
Explosive new book..important book
`A very stimulating and thought provoking book' Theodore Dalrymple, Sunday Telegraph
`Lucid [and] elegantly written... an inspiring account of individual accomplishment' Will Cohu, Daily Telegraph
About the Author
David Wootton is Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York. He has published widely in early modern intellectual history, particularly on the history of political thought, and is a regular reviewer for the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.
Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates – July 20, 2006
- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (July 20, 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0192803557
- ISBN-13: 978-0192803559
- Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,337,767 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
We are proud of humanity's progress in medicine. We like our doctors; they are consistently among the professions that the public trusts the most. There are countless books on histories of medicine, citing a proud tradition from Hippocrates on down to the latest in gene therapy. Doctors gradually but eagerly advanced to take in new techniques and new science to get us where we are today. Except this did not happen. "For 2,400 years patients have believed that doctors were doing them good; for 2,300 years they were wrong." The unsparingly pessimistic view of the overwhelming failures of doctors is that of David Wootton, a professor of history who has written _Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates_ (Oxford University Press). The world has adopted the scientific method as the way of getting information and using it, but before the dawn of germ theory, there was only a firm hold on medical traditions, and the traditions were wrong. Even worse, in many cases medical treatment became more dangerous over time, as in the case of nineteenth century hospitals causing the deaths of mothers in childbirth far more effectively than independent midwives could do. This is a grim story, and if we are past the centuries of medicine-as-tradition, there are still reasons to think that doctors may be addicted to doing the things they do because that's what they have always done.
For a couple of thousand years, medicine was based on Hippocrates and his successors, especially Galen, whose theories dealt with balancing bodily fluids, and to help nature along, doctors would induce vomiting or diarrhea, apply hot irons to the body, or drain off some blood. There was no physiological benefit in such treatments, which could do nothing but make things worse.
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