(Presumably they worked on the principle that they were a serious mood-killer.) And in general, you're left with a strong impression of quite how slow and painstaking progress has been: every basic drug and vitamin pill today, every vaccination and course of antibiotics, is founded on a centuries-long, incremental advance in knowledge that often took several steps backwards for every shuffle forwards. Things have certainly come a long way since – to pick an example almost at random from the early pages – doctors were recommending crocodile-dung pessaries as a form of contraception, as they were in Pharaonic Egypt. There are delights aplenty to be mined in this compendious history, and a myriad reasons, if you still needed any, to fall down on your knees and give thanks that we live in an age of anaesthetic and antibiotics. Porter is straightforward about his deliberate focus on Western medical traditions, citing their predominant influence on global medicine, and with The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, he has produced a volume worthy of that tradition's legacy.The defects of this book are many, but it would hurt to give it less than four stars and, the avoidance of pain being one of Porter's main themes, I will stick to a suitably thematic rating. Morton's hucksterish use of ether in surgery, and research on digestion conducted using a man with a stomach fistula (if you don't know what that means, you may not want to know). Francis Willis's curing of The Madness of King George, W.
The obvious highlights are touched upon-Hippocrates introduces his oath, Pasteur homogenizes, Jonas Salk produces the polio vaccine, and so on-but there's also Dr.
But delve into its pages, and you'll find one marvelous bit of history after another. Roy Porter, a social historian of medicine the London's Wellcome Institute, has written an 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 practicioners, however, we as a people are as worried about our health as ever. 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.
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