Invasion of the Body: Revolutions in Surgery Hardcover – October 26, 2011
Author: Visit Amazon's Nicholas L. Tilney Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0674062280 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Invasion of the Body: Revolutions in Surgery – October 26, 2011
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Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Invasion of the Body: Revolutions in Surgery – October 26, 2011
Posts about Download The Book Invasion of the Body: Revolutions in Surgery – October 26, 2011 from with Mediafire Link Download Link
Review
Dr. Tilney has an eye for fascinating details, shocking stories, and unexpected connections. Invasion of the Body is a riveting account of the astonishing transformation of surgery over the past century. (Atul Gawande, M.D.)
With the history of surgery and the surgical profession as his main subjects, Tilney does not hesitate to take readers on numerous side trips that enhance their understanding of the field and illustrate the interrelatedness among the discipline of surgery and the rest of medicine. Touching on everything from sanitation-free barber surgeons to robotics, he discusses the evolving science of surgery, the growth of the profession, the individuals responsible for incremental developments and breakthroughs, the technologies now available, and the directions in which the field might be headed...A very readable book that should prove fascinating to both lay readers and professionals. (Dick Maxwell Library Journal 2011-08-15)
Always entertaining...Dr. Tilney's analysis of surgical developments during his long career--he graduated from medical school in 1962--is little short of brilliant...Dr. Tilney provides full accounts of both the science and practice of cardiac and transplant surgery, with their backgrounds in basic immunology and the technology of the heart-lung machine. He illustrates his narrative with vivid examples of real operations, including some from his own surgical experience...He has a wonderful capacity to describe what surgeons actually do when they are operating, why they do it and why it sometimes ends in failure...Dr. Tilney is concerned, as every American citizen ought to be, with the chaotic state of American health care. His last chapter contains a great deal of wisdom (and documentation) about the problems of spiraling costs, inequality of access and the pernicious ways in which the market drives decisions about how much and what kind of treatment a patient receives...He has made a shrewd diagnosis of the lack of system in American health care, and politicians would do well to take his critique seriously. (William Bynum Wall Street Journal 2011-09-24)
Tumours removed, joints replaced, organs transplanted: every weekday, 85,000 non-emergency operations take place in the United States alone. Distinguished U.S. surgeon Nicholas L. Tilney intersperses moments from his own career with a rousing history of the evolution of surgery, breakthrough by breakthrough--from near-butchery to today's fine-tuned procedures. Wading through the gore with aplomb, he covers anaesthesia, pharmaceuticals, asepsis, health-care reform, surgery in war and in peace, facial transplants and more. (Nature 2011-09-22)
Readers will come away with a new appreciation of the scalpel-wielding specialists who have paved the way for heart and organ transplants, cancer removal, and plastic surgery. (Laura Landro Wall Street Journal 2011-12-20)
With the history of surgery and the surgical profession as his main subjects, Tilney does not hesitate to take readers on numerous side trips that enhance their understanding of the field and illustrate the interrelatedness among the discipline of surgery and the rest of medicine. Touching on everything from sanitation-free barber surgeons to robotics, he discusses the evolving science of surgery, the growth of the profession, the individuals responsible for incremental developments and breakthroughs, the technologies now available, and the directions in which the field might be headed...A very readable book that should prove fascinating to both lay readers and professionals. (Dick Maxwell Library Journal 2011-08-15)
Always entertaining...Dr. Tilney's analysis of surgical developments during his long career--he graduated from medical school in 1962--is little short of brilliant...Dr. Tilney provides full accounts of both the science and practice of cardiac and transplant surgery, with their backgrounds in basic immunology and the technology of the heart-lung machine. He illustrates his narrative with vivid examples of real operations, including some from his own surgical experience...He has a wonderful capacity to describe what surgeons actually do when they are operating, why they do it and why it sometimes ends in failure...Dr. Tilney is concerned, as every American citizen ought to be, with the chaotic state of American health care. His last chapter contains a great deal of wisdom (and documentation) about the problems of spiraling costs, inequality of access and the pernicious ways in which the market drives decisions about how much and what kind of treatment a patient receives...He has made a shrewd diagnosis of the lack of system in American health care, and politicians would do well to take his critique seriously. (William Bynum Wall Street Journal 2011-09-24)
Tumours removed, joints replaced, organs transplanted: every weekday, 85,000 non-emergency operations take place in the United States alone. Distinguished U.S. surgeon Nicholas L. Tilney intersperses moments from his own career with a rousing history of the evolution of surgery, breakthrough by breakthrough--from near-butchery to today's fine-tuned procedures. Wading through the gore with aplomb, he covers anaesthesia, pharmaceuticals, asepsis, health-care reform, surgery in war and in peace, facial transplants and more. (Nature 2011-09-22)
Readers will come away with a new appreciation of the scalpel-wielding specialists who have paved the way for heart and organ transplants, cancer removal, and plastic surgery. (Laura Landro Wall Street Journal 2011-12-20)
About the Author
Nicholas L. Tilney held the posts of Honorary Surgeon, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, and Francis D. Moore Distinguished Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School.
Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Invasion of the Body: Revolutions in Surgery – October 26, 2011
- Hardcover: 384 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1 edition (October 26, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0674062280
- ISBN-13: 978-0674062283
- Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #336,304 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Nicholas Tilney's "Invasion of the Body" is a fascinating and accessible book about the history of surgery. On one level, it's amazing to think we voluntarily let other humans cut into us with sharp instruments. In the course of one's life, it is likely that we will undergo one or more such invasive procedures. Perhaps the book's title is a play on that well-known horror flick, "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Here, though, the setting is less diabolical and more geared toward healing.
Author Tilney knows of what he speaks. He is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and is affiliated with the Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Of course, this trajectory has not been altogether smooth. Reading about early attempts at surgery, one can only imagine the pain and horror which patients endured. Tilney spotlights a number of breakthroughs, though. One was the development of anesthesia, both general and local. A second was sepsis control through hand-washing, hygiene and sterilization. A third was the development of a heart-lung bypass technology that enabled doctors to repair a heart without putting the patient at dire risk. On the horizon are innovations in micro-surgery, robotics and various drugs to augment surgical procedures.
This is a demanding book, in that you really have to concentrate. While Tilney has done it best to make the discipline accessible to a lay audience, the technical details of medicine and surgical procedure may still make the eyes of some readers glaze over.
Curiously, in his chapter about the Making of a Surgeon: Then and Now, Tilney seems to decry the current trend to limit the hours of surgeons in training. This has been a raging debate within medicine and in the training of residents.
I saw this book in Brigham gift shop while visiting a sick friend. Naturally, I bought it on Amazon for a fraction of the price. I have always been a fan of this genre of work, and you can see the major things that have changed surgery and medicine over time -- antisepsis, control of bleeding, control of infection, control of pain, improved educational standards, improved instruments and techniques and advanced pharmacology. This book goes over them and tries to tell the interesting stories behind them. Unfortunately, the author has spent too much time as a doctor to approach the subject in any but a clinical way. Instead of drama we get dry facts. You can almost read the outline. You can almost see the cases being presented as studies to med students. There are few definitions of terms for the non-doctors reading this book. What is a fistula? What is asepsis? There are soooo many of these terms not defined that you have glean from the surrounding text what they are in order to make sense of the paragraph. On the other hand, the effort taken to name the pioneers of these fields is laudable. I just wish more was done to inject the drama that would have made this book more compelling. The story of Semmelweis developing the first anti-septic techniques and how he was hounded into insanity is both exciting and heartbreaking. I suggest reading about in Wikipedia -- it's importance cannot be minimized and there's more drama. Here's he's given less than a paragraph and one sentence about his madness. And so on. And yet, I enjoyed the book very much. There is an attempt by the author to correlate expense, care, insurance and so on. I think he lets pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies off the hook too easily however.
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