Medicine advances ever faster, and with it not just a capacity to overcome sickness, but to transform the very nature of life. Starting in ancient antiquity, this text charts how this health revolution came about and how life for human beings in the West has ceased, in Hobbes' memorable phrase, to be "nasty, brutish and short." Porter plots the growth of medical specialisms - pharmacology, physiology, anatomy, neurology, bacteriology - and the institutions of medicine - the hospital and asylum - to show how medical advances have often created as many problems as they have solved. The book also shows how the ancient Egyptians treated incipient baldness with a mixture of hippopotamus, lion, crocodile, goose, snake and ibex fat; how a mystery epidemic devastated ancient Athens and brought to an end the domination of that great city; and how lemons did as much as Nelson to defeat Napolean.

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity

Medical Books

Porter,Roy

Administration & Medicine Economics

Harpercollins

How we grow; and what happens when mistakes occur Mutants is a book about how the body develops and grows from a single cell to an adult and then declines into old age. What does the new molecular genetics tell us about the human condition? How is a limb formed? Why do we have five fingers (and not six)? What controls the size to which we grow? Why do we age?More than this, however, it is a brilliant narrative history of what happens when things go wrong. This book tells, rather like a biological verison of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the stories of particularly historically important and bizarre cases: of a French convent girl of the last century who found herself changing sex upon puberty and her miserable fate in the gutters of Paris; of children, invariably stillborn, who have cylopia (one eye located beneath their nasal cavity); of a tribe of pygmies in the Andaman Islands and a village of Ecuadorian dwarves: of a remarkably hairy family who were kept at the Burmese Royal Court for four generations (and from whom Darwin took one of his keenest insights into heredity); and so on. From each important lessons are drawn that illustrate over and over again the amazing nature of cellular growth and how it works.

Mutants : On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body

Politics & Social Sciences

Armand Marie Leroi

Anthropology

HARPER/COLLINS

Fascinating account of the early explorers and botanists who contributed to the search for a malaria cure.

The Miraculous Fever-Tree: Malaria, Medicine and the Cure that Changed the World [Quinine]

Rocco, Fiammetta

History

HC: HarperCollins

Set to become the standard work on the history of medicine, this book is also a treasure trove of historical surprises. Roy Porter shows how lemons did as much as Nelson to defeat Napoleon and how African slaves became immune to malaria.

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind

Roy, Porter

HarperCollins, Publishers

Mutants : On the Form@@ Varieties and Errors of the Human Body

LeRoi, Armand Marie

Harper-perennial

A rich and wonderful history of quinine – the cure for malaria.
In the summer of 1623, ten cardinals and hundreds of their attendants, engaged in electing a new Pope, died from the 'mal'aria' or 'bad air' of the Roman marshes. Their choice, Pope Urban VIII, determined that a cure should be found for the fever that was the scourge of the Mediterranean, northern Europe and America, and in 1631 a young Jesuit apothecarist in Peru sent to the Old World a cure that had been found in the New – where the disease was unknown.
The cure was quinine, an alkaloid made of the bitter red bark of the cinchona tree, which grows in the Andes. Both disease and cure have an extraordinary history. Malaria badly weakened the Roman Empire. It killed thousands of British troops fighting Napoleon during the Walcheren raid on Holland in 1809 and many soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War. It turned back many of the travellers who explored west Africa and brought the building of the Panama Canal to a standstill. When, after a thousand years, a cure was finally found, Europe's Protestants, among them Oliver Cromwell, who suffered badly from malaria, feared it was nothing more than a Popish poison. More than any previous medicine, though, quinine forced physicians to change their ideas about treating illness. Before long, it would change the face of Western medicine.
Using fresh research from the Vatican and the Indian Archives in Seville, as well as hitherto undiscovered documents in Peru, Fiammetta Rocco describes the ravages of the disease, the quest of the three Englishmen who smuggled cinchona seeds out of South America, the way quinine opened the door to Western imperial adventure in Asia, Africa and beyond, and why, even today, quinine grown in the eastern Congo still saves so many people suffering from malaria.

The Miraculous Fever-Tree: Malaria, Medicine and the Cure that Changed the World

Science & Math

Fiammetta Rocco

Agricultural Sciences

HarperCollins Publishers, Ltd

The stunning debut of Jonathan Ree, the Simon Schama of philosophy. 'I See A Voice is a joy to read: bold, crisp in style, effortlessly erudite, slyly humorous, passionate and humane.' Roy Porter, Independent 'Ree writes with such clarity and elegance that his prose is a pleasure to read. His exploration of the world of the deaf demonstrates that their tragic deprivation of one sense illumines our understanding of the others. His study of sign language gives us unparalleled insight into the nature of spoken language! this book is not only a fascinating history of the belated correction of our misperceptions of the deaf, but a demonstration that philosophy really can advance our understanding of the world and ourselves.' Anthony Storr, Literary Review 'Some philosophers take difficulty and try to make it simple, but Ree takes what is apparently mundane and undeniably everyday and makes it hard and wonderful. Reading his book, I had to sit at a table, with a pen and notebook, jotting down things I had never thought about before -- asking myself how it was that I had lived with this commonsense all my life, yet never been in possession of its meanings! Ree treats philosophy the way Adam Phillips treats psychoanalysis: he scrutinises the everyday and the commonplace and charges them with significance. Psychoanalysis and the writings of Freud flood into his text, along with the poetry of Wordsworth, the writings of Proust, his own poignant memories of things past. The melancholy richness of his writing soaks up the culture of the late twentieth century: its emphasis on subjectivity and uncertainity; its sense of the individual; its receptivity to other forms; its confessionalism and belief in self scrutiny! in his passionate, fascinating philosophical history of language, deafness and the senses.' Nicci Gerrard, Observer

I See a Voice

Jonathan Rée

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Flamingo

Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha, Mukherjee

Health, Fitness & Dieting

BOOKCOUN

The Chinese described the emotions as being a cause of ill health as early as 200 BC. It is now universally recognized that anger, guilt, joy, jealousy, fear etc have a strong effect on our body.

Healing Your Emotions: Discover your five element type and change your life

Hicks, Angela

Hicks PhD Drac Dipchm Mbacc Mrchm, Former Drummond Professor of Political Economy John

Parenting & Relationships

Thorsons

award winning science writer examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision

The Emperor of All Maladies

MUKHERJEE, SIDDHARTHA

World

Scribner

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