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

The task of hygiene was to maintain a balanced constitution, and the role of medicine was to restore the balance when disturbed. Parallels to these views appear in the classical Chinese and Indian medical traditions.

Post-Vesalian investigations dramatically advanced knowledge of the structures and functions of the living organism.

Aristotle was the first who systematically used dissection findings (animal not human) as a grounding for his biomedical theories.

‘If you examine a man having a dislocation of his mandible, should you find his mouth open, and his mouth cannot close, you should put your two thumbs upon the end of the two rami of the mandible inside his mouth and your fingers under his chin and you should cause them to fall back so that they rest in their places.’

‘If a physician has performed a major operation on a lord with a bronze lancet and has saved the lord’s life . . . he shall receive ten shekels of silver’ (more than a craftsman’s annual pay); but if he caused the death of such a notable, his hand would be chopped off.

if the convulsive patient behaved in a goatlike way, or ground his teeth, the cause allegedly lay in Hera, the mother of the gods; Hecate, the goddess of sorcery, was to blame if the sufferer experienced nightmares and delirium;

(‘a night with Venus, a lifetime with mercury’, people quipped).

The doctor should therefore observe sickness, attending the patient and identifying symptom clusters and their rhythms.

(1738–1814), whose praise of its humanity (it was fast and foolproof) illustrates the Revolution’s chilling blend of idealism and inhumanity.