Western Medicine: An Illustrated History

Hardcover, 347 pages
Size: 10" x 7"
ISBN 0198205090
978-0198205098
Oxford University Press
September 1997
(click below for the very best currently available price for this item)

This timeless book is an interesting and fascinating read for practitioners and anyone working in medicine. It is wonderful addition to any medical library, living room or coffee table.

From ancient religious rituals and magical incantations, to Renaissance practices such as purging, bleeding, and trepanning, to modern day miracles such as antibiotics, CAT scans, and organ transplants, the advance of western medicine has been nothing short of astonishing.

Now, in this richly illustrated volume - boasting 150 pictures, including 24 pages of color plates - readers have an authoritative and wide-ranging history of Western medicine, charting the great milestones of medical progress, from the birth of rational medicine in the classical world right up to the present day.

The history begins in ancient Greece, where medical practice, under the auspices of Hippocrates and others, first looked past supernatural explanations and began to understand disease as a product of natural causes. The book examines the contributions of the great Islamic physicians, such as Rhazes (Al-Razi) and Avicenna (Ibn-Sina), who had a profound impact on the practice of medieval medicine, and it chronicles the slow growth of medical knowledge through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, illuminating the work of figures such as Paracelsus, Vesalius, and William Harvey (who explained how blood circulates through the body).

It has been in the last two centuries that medical practice has made its greatest strides, and Western Medicine provides informative portraits of figures as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch (the fathers of bacteriology), Wilhelm Roentgen (discoverer of x-rays), and Paul Ehrlich (who pioneered the use of chemicals to destroy disease-causing organisms), and many others. And as the contributors highlight the great medical discoveries, they also cover broader medical and social themes, examining for instance the rise of medical training in universities (beginning around 1200 AD), the relationship in the Renaissance between medicine and art, and the tension between the church and an increasingly secularized medical professional class, tension that continues to this day.

The book also explores nursing, midwifery, and the rise of the hospital, traces our slow understanding of the patterns of epidemics and the geography of disease (tracking for example the devastating effects of disease brought about through colonization and the slave trade), and charts our changing attitudes towards child birth, mental disease, and the doctor-patient relationship.

Authoritative, informative, and beautifully designed, this volume offers a fascinating introduction to medicine in the West. In addition to its generous illustrations, the volume includes a glossary, an extended list of suggested further reading, a chronology, and a full index, making it an indispensable reference for anyone interested in medical history.

"This beautifully produced book has two purposes. The first is to answer the question posed by the editor, Irvine Loudon, who is both a medical historian and an artist: 'What is medical history, and who are medical historians?' Here are 19 diverse essays on the history of medicine, each by a different historian; many of the contributors are from the United Kingdom. The book stands as a showcase of what medical historians are doing in the 1990s, and how they do it. Loudon does not attempt to be encyclopedic. The essays are broad, thoughtful, lively, and written for the general (educated) reader, and they are of uniformly high quality. Seven essays take us from medicine in the classical world to medicine in later centuries in Europe and Islam, and on to medicine at the end of the 20th century. Eleven essays focus on specific topics, such as childbirth, the mind, and the spread of Western medicine. The book succeeds in demonstrating both the richness of medical history as a field in the 1990s and the centrality of health and medicine in the history of Western culture." - New England Journal of Medicine

	List of Colour Plates
	List of Contributors
1	Medicine in View: Art and Visual Representation	1
2	Medicine in the Classical World	25
3	Europe and Islam	40
4	Medicine in the Latin Middle Ages	54
5	Medicine and the Renaissance	66
6	From the Scientific Revolution to the Germ Theory	80
7	From the Germ Theory to 1945	102
8	Medicine in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century	123
9	The Growth of Medical Education and the Medical Profession	147
10	The Rise of the Modern Hospital	160
11	Epidemics and the Geography of Disease	176
12	Nurses and Ancillaries in the Christian Era	192
13	Childbirth	206
14	Children in Hospital	221
15	Medicine and the Mind	232
16	The Spread of Western Medicine	249
17	Unofficial and Unorthodox Medicine	264
18	Medicine, Politics, and the State	277
19	The Patient's View	291
	Further Reading	307
	Chronology	316
	Glossary	324
	Illustration Sources	329
	Index	331

(information from the publisher)

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