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

“mind” from “body,” a virus that was harmful not only to infected individuals but to larger communities when it became a weapon used to justify colonialism, slavery, displacement of tribal peoples, and ravaging the earth. We always knew that different viruses were alive in other parts of the world, and that wise people were crafting other ways to d

Just as we turn to doctors and psychotherapists today, medieval people regularly consulted diviners,10 astrologers, and spiritual healers. But beginning in the sixteenth century, the scientific revolution brought a cascade of discoveries that filled in once-mysterious spaces with knowledge.

They were killed by many of the disasters of childbirth that modern Western medicine has almost prevented, from haemorrhage to obstruction or infection – though the lack of hospitals, where infections in early modern Europe easily passed from one woman to another,

Tracing its origins back to the fifteenth century, an Italian lawyer and doctor by the name of Hippolytus de Marsiliis was the first person to document sleep deprivation as a means of torture. He was best known for documenting the Chinese water torture method too, in which drops of water would consistently fall on a victim’s forehead, causing them