The Alarming History of Medicine - Amusing Anecdotes from Hippocrates to Heart Transplants

Richard Gordon

St. Martin's Griffin

1997

256 páginas

8h 32m

ISBN-13: 9780312167639

Gordon here presents unusual insights into medical advances. He demonstrates that many medical milestones resulted from fallacies, luck or serendipity--citing the role of barbers and warfare in promoting surgery--and that forgotten laboratory bacterial specimens led to a cholera vaccine and the discovery of penicillin.

Resenhas (2)

2 (Razoável)

Fiat lux

Mr. Gordon’s narrative covers some important checkpoints throughout medicine which revolutionized and refined technologies, entire line of thoughts, methods, practices, ideologies and parameters which were responsible for saving many lives and the evolution of science guided by the Hippocratic oath. Science was and still is interfering in the death business, which its stages shown by chronological order, to say the least, made dogmas very unhappy.
The medical profession has a well-documented history with memorable and easily identifiable thresholds. For example, the evolution of anaesthesia registered by the old thick books is a great triumph along with great consequences. Starting with nitrous oxide to exorcize the pain of childbirth, passing onto Ether and chloroform in the late 1800’s causing addictions, lung irritations, vomit crisis, cardiac arrests and death.
One thing is certain, we cannot take for granted. At early stages, the treatment for exposed fractures was necessarily amputation, the smoothest way for bloodletting was done by the leech creature, operations were done by barbers with a little more daring, obstetrics was invented necessarily to repair the damages done by childbirth at the countryside and not to mention countless epidemic wars which decimated nations letting us ever to wander.
It is also worth mentioning the battle against dogmas. It’s plain and simple: Medicines were beginning to show more effectiveness than prayers. It was not so long ago when Galeno (c. 132-200 d.C.) observed that Adam’s sons didn’t have a rib less in their cage, when Calvin in the midst 1500’s burned a man on the stake for discovering the pulmonary circulation and plastic surgery in the late 17th century was considered a sin, prohibited in Paris.
In all matters, it’s a culture of refinement, all well connected. From the heartbeat being measured in 1500’s by the movement of a pendulum, thermometers which needed to be sucked at least for 20 minutes and countless deaths in the history of herbalism all the way to the aseptic technique, the genome map and the x-ray, we began to turn diseases into symptoms. So, countless humble Nobel prize winners throughout the centuries tell the story of our fallibility, the trial-and-error tale still to be written.

Link to my highlights: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mlB2pooQR4yyGthq7WQ5IjkFd-mEVAF4/view?usp=share_link