The Greatest Benefit to Mankind

This history of medicine follows the treatment of the sick from ancient Near Eastern, Greek, and Chinese practice through medieval hospitals, Renaissance anatomy, and the clinical and laboratory medicine of later centuries. Porter tracks changing ideas of disease, the rise of the doctor as a profession, surgery, public health, psychiatry, and the germ theory, then the drugs, specialisms, and state systems of the modern hospital. He attends to patients as well as practitioners and to the limits of cure. The book is a long survey of healing as a social and scientific enterprise, not a biography of one discoverer and not a clinical manual.

Quarter-bound in pale blue cloth with paper sides, printed with images by Cath Riley. Pale blue slipcase with front image.