The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (The Norton History of Science)

This book is a very pleasant and worth reading. It provokes the reader almost on every page because the author was one of the most thoughtful scholars and professors of history of medicine. This masterpiece presents the reader with a very sharp and honest description of the origins and development of Western medicine, obscure and not as heroic or mytical as some would like to believe. This book remits the reader to key questions about the frailty of human health and the stablishment of medicine as science late in human history. The author's style is definitely thought provoking and may be disturbing to some that would prefer to think of Medicine not as a coordinate social struggle preventing and fighting disease with weapons like penicillin, a drug no more than fifty-years old, but maybe rather as an extremely high-tech panacea. Medicine, regardless its Western or Oriental basis, relays upon clever, respectful and humble physicians preventing maladies and treating patients and their suffering, not only diseases.

This is a magnificent overview of the history of disease and medicine from antiquity to the modern age. Porter writes with humour and insight, selecting carefully from the abundance of evidence the significant moments and figures. Both fascinating and informative this book is also extremely good value with its 718 pages, plus bibliography and index. This is my best buy for the year.

... will probably be the development of your biceps from holding this ponderous tome in front of your eyes for the several months that it may take you to finish it! Yes, this is a mercilessly ample and detailed account of the history of medical thought and practice. It's mercifully non-technical, however, and gracefully written, and certainly worth the labor of reading it if you're at all interested in the history of science. At least seven-eighths of the text is devoted to Western - that is, European-based - medical developments; forgive my bias here, but that's how it should be. There are unquestionably omissions - Thank Aesculapius! - but none that matter much in the sweep of such an encyclopedic narrative. Extremely well-informed readers may find points of contention in it. I didn't, but I'd never claim to be well-informed about medical matters. Some wag has 'tagged' this book on amazon as a 'very short introduction'. Ho ho ho!

You may wonder why it took me so long to read this book, given that I pride myself on fast reading. Frankly, I couldn't absorb so much info in a single dosage. I picked the book up and put it down dozens of times, perusing a chapter or a sub-chapter at a time. It's the sort of reading matter that makes one wish knowledge could be delivered intravenously.

this book is not easy to read. it reads like an encyclopedia, and a bad one at that. i could only bear a few hundred pages of it before i felt that i was wasting my time. only for the serious medical history student.

Wouldn't buy as a pleasure read, but has come in handy when I need concise background on a specific disease.

Great book, interesting.

Roy Porter’s history of medicine — intended to be comprehensive within the bounds of one volume — is somewhat triumphalist.

And why not? After 5,000 years of being unable to cure or prevent much of anything, about 150 years ago the scientific approach finally reached takeoff, so that today smallpox is eliminated and surgeons are able to repair the hearts of babies in the womb.

Yet Porter — who died young and undoctored in 2002 — is also somewhat pessimistic in “The Greatest Benefit of Mankind.”

And why not? In America at least half the population adheres to cults that still teach that disease is caused by demons, and there are millions more (often overlapping the first category) who ignore scientific medicine in favor of quackery like chiropractic, homeopathy, naturopathy, qi gong, Rolfing and who knows what other nonsense.

Porter spends about 200 mostly earnest, occasionally lively pages rehearsing the more or less self-conscious medical belief systems of the pre-moderns. He pays no attention to folk or unorganized medicine although these of course are a big part of the whole history of medicine and still much with us; practically everyone in Mexico believes in the imaginary illness called fallen fontanelle, and similar survivals can be found anywhere.

Then he plunges in with his famous (in his home country of England) gusto to the scientific approach, which can be dated almost precisely to 1543, the miracle year when men, at least in western Europe, began to shed the superstitions of 100,000 years. It was a mostly discouraging slog, at least from the perspective of healing, because even though genuine knowledge accumulated, slowly, then, from about 1800, quickly, methods of preventing or curing disease were not found.

Porter writes amusingly and with more than usual candor about the rare advances. We not only learn (what we already knew from other sources) that Samuel Pepys was successfully cut for stone but the icky procedure that the surgeons had to use.

Only once does Porter falter, when he credits the early Christians for inventing the concept of charity as exemplified in the first hospitals. John Boswell, in “The Kindness of Strangers: Child Abandonment in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance,” showed that something like hospitals were created hundreds of years before the alleged appearance of Jesus.

Porter is right to say that hospitals were not originally intended to preserve life but to assist men to a good death — the ars moriendi. Only much later did the concept of leaving a hospital arrive and later still the concentration of medical care in hospitals, soon to be renamed medical centers.

For most of medical history, doctors offered solace not healing. And still today, that is most of what customers are asking for. And, according to Porter, not getting it, which helps explain the embrace of chiropractic and suchlike quackery. He is right at least as far as the quest for solace goes; Numerous studies have found that most (around 60%) of visits to primary care doctors are from people who do not have any organic condition. They just feel bad. Add in the ones who go to chiropractors and the like and the proportion of pointless chasing of medical or pseudomedical attention must soar to some ridiculous figure.

However, the situation is not so simple. Even evangelical Christians who are told by, eg, Rev. Pat Robertson that disease is caused by demons go to scientific doctors, not witch-doctors, when they are really sick. I recall an amusing though unself-aware instance at a public hearing years ago.

Health insurors generally decline to cover services for certain conditions if the modality chosen is one that does not provide emergency room care. The chiropractor testifying was aggrieved to be kept off that gravy train because, as he explained to the county council, there aren’t any chiropractic emergency rooms.

Of course not. Nobody in his right mind goes to a chiropractor when he is really sick.

Porter’s summary chapters on medicine, state and society and medicine and the people are useful, even if you have no interest in the history of medicine, for their succinct catalogue of most of the issues that the success of scientific medicine has created for itself. It will be particularly revealing for American rightwingers who have swallowed whole the lies told about Britain’s spectacularly successful National Health Service over the years.

What it cannot reveal is why Porter himself refused to go to any doctor.

good

Very interesting read. Thank you!

Came in on time and was New with zero problems