The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity

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. With all the capabilities of modern medicine's practicioners, however, we as a people are as worried about our health as ever.

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. But delve into its pages, and you'll find one marvelous bit of history after another. 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. Francis Willis's curing of The Madness of King George, W. T. G. 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). 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.

• Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
• The Footprints of the Ancients: The Footprints of the Ancients Readings in World History from Hammurabi's Code to the Letters of Columbus
• Medicine and Western Civilization
• Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now
• The Analects (Penguin Classics)
• Confessions (Oxford World's Classics)
• China's Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China
• The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
• Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now
• The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry