Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine by Roy Porter

Author:Roy Porter [Porter, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Medical, History, General
ISBN: 9780393325690
Google: Bms1BSewf7AC
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2002-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Therapies

Throw out opium . . .; throw out a few specifics . . .; throw out wine, which is a food, and the vapors which produce the miracle of anaesthesia, and I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind, – and all the worse for the fishes.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Medical Essays (1891)

Organized laboratory investigation in the nineteenth century provided the seedbed for new biomedical sciences. It also became the crucible for dazzling pharmaceutical breakthroughs. This was especially welcome because, as we saw in Chapter 2, therapeutics had lagged behind other branches of medicine – hence the fatalistic doctrine of ‘therapeutic nihilism’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.