This riveting book takes the reader around the globe and through the centuries to discover how different cultures have sought to combat and treat physical pain. With colorful stories and sometimes frightening anecdotes, Dr. Thomas Dormandy describes a checkered progression of breakthroughs, haphazard experiments, ignorant attitudes, and surprising developments in human efforts to control pain. Attitudes toward pain and its perception have changed, as have the means of pain relief and scientific understanding. Dr. Dormandy offers a thoroughly fascinating, multi-cultural history that culminates with a discussion of today’s successesand failuresin the struggle against pain. The book’s exploration is fused with accounts of the development of specific methods of pain relief, including the use of alcohol, plants, hypnosis, religious faith, stoic attitudes, local anesthesia, general anesthesia, and modern analgesics. Dr. Dormandy also looks at the most recent advances in pain clinics and palliative care for patients with terminal disease as well as the prospects for loosening pain’s grip in the future.

The Worst of Evils: The Fight Against Pain

Politics & Social Sciences

Dormandy, Thomas

Anthropology

Yale University Press

Is opium a vile curse on society, a blessed medicine from God, or possibly both? This fresh history offers surprising new insights. Opium and its derivatives morphine and heroin have destroyed, corrupted, and killed individuals, families, communities, and even whole nations. And yet, for most of its long history, opium has also been humanity's most effective means of alleviating physical and mental pain. This extraordinary book encompasses the entire history of the world's most fascinating drug, from the first evidence of poppy cultivation by stone-age man to the present-day opium trade in Afghanistan. Dr. Thomas Dormandy tells the story with verve and insight, uncovering the strange power of opiates to motivate major conflicts yet also inspire great art and medical breakthroughs, to trigger the rise of global criminal networks yet also revolutionize attitudes toward well-being.
Opium: Reality's Dark Dream traverses the globe and the centuries, exploring opium's role in colonialism, the Chinese Opium Wars, laudanum-inspired sublime Romantic poetry, American "Yellow Peril" fears, the rise of the Mafia and the black market, 1960s counterculture, and more. Dr. Dormandy also recounts exotic or sad stories of individual addiction. Throughout the book the author emphasizes opium's complex, valuable relationship with developments in medicine, health, and disease, highlighting the perplexing dual nature of the drug as both the cause and relief of great suffering in widely diverse civilizations.

Opium: Reality's Dark Dream

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Addiction & Recovery

This riveting book takes the reader around the globe and through the centuries to discover how different cultures have sought to combat and treat physical pain. With colorful stories and sometimes frightening anecdotes, Dr. Thomas Dormandy describes a checkered progression of breakthroughs, haphazard experiments, ignorant attitudes, and surprising developments in human efforts to control pain. Attitudes toward pain and its perception have changed, as have the means of pain relief and scientific understanding. Dr. Dormandy offers a thoroughly fascinating, multi-cultural history that culminates with a discussion of today’s successes―and failures―in the struggle against pain. The book’s exploration is fused with accounts of the development of specific methods of pain relief, including the use of alcohol, plants, hypnosis, religious faith, stoic attitudes, local anesthesia, general anesthesia, and modern analgesics. Dr. Dormandy also looks at the most recent advances in pain clinics and palliative care for patients with terminal disease as well as the prospects for loosening pain’s grip in the future.

Science & Math

Who were the scientific geniuses behind some of the most innovative and important discoveries in modern medicine?     Medical science in the 21st century is continuing to advance, but the character of that advancement is now governed by research teams and committees. Yet in the 19th century – a century when there were many great individual discoveries in medicine – the contributions of four individuals in particular accelerated developments in each of the main branches of medicine. This medical history by Thomas Dormandy focuses on these four individuals and their "moments of truth" - Laennec, a French physician; Semmelweis, a Hungarian obstetrician; Lister, a Scottish surgeon; and Walter Reed, an American army pathologist. They are not well known, compared with their contemporaries in other walks of life, yet their moments of truth transformed the lives of millions. Thomas Dormandy is a retired consultant pathologist (MD, PhD, DSc, FRCS, FRCPath). He is the author of over 300 scientific papers and two books aimed at a general readership, The White Death: A History of Turberculosis , which was short listed for the Aventis prize and RMS book of the month, and Old Masters, a work of art history.

Moments of Truth: Four Creators of Modern Medicine

History

World

wiley

The victims of tuberculosis (usually known as consumption) included not only Keats, The Brontës, Chopin and Chekhov, but members of almost every family. It was a killer on a huge scale.
The White Death is an outstanding history of tuberculosis. Thomas Dormandy's engrossing account of the search for a cure is complemented by a description of its complex natural history and by portraits of individual sufferers, including writers, artists, and musicians, whose lives and work were shaped (and often tragically curtailed) by the disease. But, tuberculosis is not just a disease of the past. In many parts of the world it is still a bigger killer than AIDS, while in America and Europe drug-resistant strains threaten its resurgence.

The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis

Medical Books

Medicine

New York University Press

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Thomas Dormandy. xiv, 433 p., ill. Light edge wear.There are several creases on the back cover.The page block is clean- binding tight and square, contents clean and unmarked.

Allied Health Professions

The Hambledon Press

"Ancora imparo" (Still I'm learning) -Michelangelo, Aged 87 
"If Heaven will grant me but ten more years, I promise to be a truly great artist." -Hokusai, Aged 89 
Kandinsky, Titian, Hals, Turner, Renoir and Munch, and a surprisingly large number of other major artists, lived to be over seventy-five. Some of their finest and most distinctive works, including Michelangelo's last Pietà, Goya's Black Paintings and Monet's Water Lilies, were done in old age. Whether experimenting with new approaches, adopting new techniques, responding to changed circumstances and debilities, or reacting to the approach of death, the intensity of the late work of many of the greatest artists is striking. 
Childhood genius has often been studied but, astonishingly, this is the first book to draw attention to a considerably more important artistic phenomenon. Old Masters establishes beyond doubt the frequency with which elderly painters and sculptors reached new heights in their seventies and eighties and suggest why and how they did so. 
Beautifully illustrated and superbly written, Old Masters offers us a rare, intimate, and often surprising glimpse into the final days of some of the world's most cherished artists. 
Praise for Thomas Dormandy's The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis: 
"Dormandy weaves together cultural and medical history with the skill of a learned, witty, and humane scholar . . . strongly recommended." -Library Journal 
"Dormandy vividly details the long struggle against tuberculosis. . . . Prodigious research and an engaging anecdotal style make this a fascinating foray into the history of medicine." -Publishers Weekly 
"[A] marvelous book. . . . [It is} enlivened by Dormandy's mordant wit and idiosyncratic style." -Anita Brookner, The Sunday Times 
"One of the most readable medical histories ever." -Sunday Express

Old Masters: Great Artists in Old Age

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

UNKNO

The victims of tuberculosis (usually known as consumption) included not only Keats, The Brontës, Chopin and Chekhov, but members of almost every family. It was a killer on a huge scale.The White Death is an outstanding history of tuberculosis. Thomas Dormandy's engrossing account of the search for a cure is complemented by a description of its complex natural history and by portraits of individual sufferers, including writers, artists, and musicians, whose lives and work were shaped (and often tragically curtailed) by the disease. But, tuberculosis is not just a disease of the past. In many parts of the world it is still a bigger killer than AIDS, while in America and Europe drug-resistant strains threaten its resurgence.

NYU Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dormandy, Thomas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dormandy, Thomas

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dormandy, Thomas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Worst of Evils: The Fight Against Pain

Opium: Reality's Dark Dream

The Worst of Evils: The Fight Against Pain

Moments of Truth: Four Creators of Modern Medicine

The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis

The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis

Old Masters: Great Artists in Old Age

The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis