Items17The creator’s order
  1. 1The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (1997)The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (1997)Published Jan 1, 1997If you read one survey, make it this one. Porter starts with the Hippocratic tradition and runs to the present day of the late 1990s in a little over 800 pages, with chapters on Indian and Chinese medicine alongside the Western story he mostly tells. What keeps it from being a parade of great men…0
  2. 2BAD MEDICINE: DOCTORS DOING HARM SINCE HIPPOCRATES (2006)BAD MEDICINE: DOCTORS DOING HARM SINCE HIPPOCRATES (2006)Published Jan 1, 2006The antidote to every cheerful timeline of medical progress. Wootton argues that for most of its history medicine did patients little good and probably a great deal of harm, and that doctors only really justified themselves with antisepsis and germ theory in the nineteenth century. He moves from…0
  3. 3Unwell Women (2021)Unwell Women (2021) 10.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2021A history of medicine told from the side of the patients it misread. Cleghorn follows the idea of the "wandering womb" from ancient Greece through to modern thinking on hormones, menstruation and menopause, showing how women's complaints were again and again tied to their reproductive systems. It…0
  4. 4Madness in Civilization (2015)Madness in Civilization (2015)Published Jan 1, 2015Mental illness gets thin coverage in most general histories, so this fills the biggest gap on the list. Scull runs from madness in the ancient world and the Bible through exorcism, mesmerism and the asylum era to Freud and modern drug treatment. He treats madness as woven into each society rather…0
  5. 5The Great Mortality (2005)The Great Mortality (2005) 7.3/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2005The Black Death through the eyes of people who lived through it. Much of Kelly's narrative rests on the accounts of monks, doctors and other literate witnesses who nursed the sick and buried the dead, which gives the book a ground-level view that most plague histories lack. It is frank about what…0
  6. 6The Knife Man (2005)The Knife Man (2005)Published Jan 1, 2005John Hunter was the most famous surgeon in eighteenth-century London, and Moore does not let you forget where his anatomical knowledge came from. The dead of the city could end up on his dissecting table by way of body snatchers, and the lengths he went to for his research raised questions then and…0
  7. 7The butchering art (2017)The butchering art (2017) 9.5/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2017Victorian operating theaters were known as "gateways of death," and Fitzharris puts you in the gallery to see why. Her subject is Joseph Lister, who argued that germs were the source of infection and could be fought with antiseptics, and who turned surgery from a brutal ordeal into a safer…0
  8. 8The Ghost Map (2006)The Ghost Map (2006) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2006The best introduction to public health as a detective story. In 1854 cholera brought more than 500 fatal attacks in ten days around Broad Street in Soho, and Johnson follows the physician John Snow and the Reverend Henry Whitehead as their paths crossed over the outbreak, the pump and the hunt for…0
  9. 9Pox (2011)Pox (2011)Published Jan 1, 2011The book to read on vaccination as public health in practice, with all its force and friction. Willrich covers the smallpox epidemic that swept the United States from 1898 to 1904, when officials vaccinated people at gunpoint in the South, quarantined African Americans suspected of carrying the…0
  10. 10The Great Influenza (2004)The Great Influenza (2004) 7.8/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2004Barry's account of the 1918 flu pandemic is really two books, and both are worth having. The first is a history of how American medicine became a science, built around William Welch and the new Johns Hopkins medical school; the second is the pandemic itself, which killed tens of millions of people…0