But delve into its pages and you'll find one marvellous piece of history after another. Roy Porter, a social historian of medicine at London's Wellcome Institute, has written a dauntingly thick history of how medical thinking and practice has risen to the challenges of disease through the centuries. With all the capabilities of modern medicine's practitioners, however, we as a people are as worried about our health as ever. (Apr.Samuel Johnson once called the medical profession "the greatest benefit to mankind." In the 20th century, the quality of that benefit has improved more and more rapidly than at any other comparable time in history.
Porter is a professor of the social history of medicine in London. Written with storytelling flair and erudition, this study will be of interest to laypersons and professionals alike. His diagnoses: modern medicine urgently needs to redefine its goals and priorities. Finally, he weights the breakthroughs of the last 50 years in genetics, immunology, bacteriology and psychopharmacology against a record of disastrous drugs, iatrogenic (physician-induced) illness, medicalization of normal events, unequal access to health care, emerging lethal viral diseases and the intractability of chronic disorders. Although the scope of Porter's account of physicians, theories, advances and diseases can be daunting, he leavens his presentation with allusions to Moliere, Boccaccio, Swift, Pepys and Maugham, and extends his analysis of medicine's social dimensions to patient-doctor relations, medical responses to insanity, the influx of women healers into a male monopoly, the politics of public health and the intertwining of medicine with colonization, conquest, urban growth and religion. At the same time, he is nonjudgmental, examining each healing system on its own terms for possible value today. Neither demonizing nor glorifying modern high-tech medicine, his epic history underscores the enormous progress achieved when Western medical science, by dint of anatomical and physiological investigations beginning in the Renaissance, broke decisively with the world's traditional medical systems-ancient Greek, Chinese, Indian Ayurvedic, herbalism, and the like-which viewed health as a precarious balance among the body, the universe and society.
Porter's magisterial chronicle of medical thinking and practice deserves the popularity of his bestselling London: A Social History.
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