A Short History of Medicine PDF

Rating: (4 reviews) Author: ISBN : 9780801827266 New from $13.95 Format: PDF

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Since it was first published in 1955, "A Short History of Medicine• has beenhailed as the best available book of its kind: a concise and readableintroduction to the history of medicine, written for students and professionalsalike. This revised edition of Erwin H. Ackerknecht's classic volume is nowavailable in paperback, making the book especially suitable for classroom use.

Direct download links available for PRETITLE A Short History of Medicine [Paperback] POSTTITLE

• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press; Revised edition (March 1, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801827264
• ISBN-13: 978-0801827266
• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 5.8 x 8.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

A Short History of Medicine PDF

Ackerknecht's Short History of Medicine is great but with few caveats. It is VERY complete and the completeness means that in addition to some engaging stories, there are parts that read like a list of names, diseases and discoveries without much else. Also, it remains very solid but is a bit dated. This is not at all surprising since it has not been updated since 1982. By being a global review, this book skips some of the interesting stories associated with Virchow, Hunter, Halstead, Koch and many others. For example, he spends one paragraph on the discovery of surgical anaesthsia, a ridiculously great story told more completely by Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It. The fact that there are more readable books about specific incidents in medical history should not detract from this fine book since it would have to expand to several dense volumes if Ackerknect were to go into more detail. If interested, I'd recommend The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery, Doctors: The Biography of Medicine and Doctors: The Illustrated History of Medical Pioneers.

The main benefit of "A short history of Medicine" is its completeness without being overly huge.

Although the emphasis here is on "short," Erwin Ackerknecht's history contains plenty for both the naﶥ reader who knows next to nothing about the progress of medical science and for the better educated reader who may know a lot about medicine (even be a qualified physician) but who may not know so much about how his expertise developed through time and space.

At the rate of about 10 years per page, Ackerknecht hits only the high points, but his goal is rather to let those illustrate a series of philosophical points. An incomplete list includes:

1. The move from whole body sickness to what Ackerknecht calls localism. In primitive minds, sickness was not a defect of an organ like the liver but of the personality.

2. Consequently, the cause of sickness was not organic defect but immorality or sin.

3. Physiology had to precede diagnosis, which was mere symptomatology until the functions of organs could be determined.

4. Nevertheless, astute clinicians were able to provide effective treatment.

5. Public health measures and epidemics both arose from the same factor: agglomeration of large numbers of people in small spaces. (The same applies to animals, although Ackerknecht seldom mentions veterinary medicine, and to plants, although he never mentions diseases of plants.)

6. The separation of medicine and surgery for many centuries had a pernicious effect on both.

7. Up to sometime in the 15th century, the various medical traditions (of Europe, India, America, China, the Moslem lands) were different but about equal. If anything, Europe lagged behind, having regressed from a peak achieved by the Greeks in Roman Empire days. The European adoption of the experimental method left all other traditions in the dust.