The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (The Norton History of Science)

Rotting food and faeces clogging the system were considered perilous, hence the need to prevent pus formation and to cleanse the innards with laxatives.

The heart’s heat dilated the lungs, fresh air rushed in, cooled the blood, and, warmed by the blood’s heat, was then expired.

The guillotine, that high-tech tool of the Jacobin Terror, was ironically the invention of a progressive Paris physician, Dr Joseph Guillotin

All societies possess medical beliefs: ideas of life and death, disease and cure, and systems of healing. Schematically speaking, the medical history of humanity may be seen as a series of stages. Belief systems the world over have attributed sickness to illwill, to malevolent spirits, sorcery, witchcraft and diabolical or divine intervention. Such

‘Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experience fallacious, judgment difficult,’ proclaims the first of the Hippocratic aphorisms, outlining the arduous but honourable labour of the physician.

were more successful in assisting people to cope with chronic conditions and soothing lesser ailments than in conquering life-threatening infections which became endemic and epidemic in the civilized world:

The idea of probing into bodies, living and dead (and especially human bodies) with a view to improving medicine is more or less distinctive to the European medical tradition.

The centrality of anatomy to medicine’s project was proclaimed in the Renaissance

This separation of medicine from religion points to another distinctive feature of Greek healing: its openness, a quality characteristic of Greek intellectual activity at large, which it owed to political diversity and cultural pluralism.