Medicine And Western Civilization

This fabulous anthology is sure to be a core text for history of medicine and social science classes in colleges across the country. In order to demonstrate how medical research has influenced Western cultural perspectives, the editors have collected original works from 61 different authors around nine major themes (among them "Anatomy and Destiny," "Psyche and Soma," and "The Construction of Pain, Suffering, and Death"). The authors range from Aristotle, the Bible, and Louis Pasteur, to Masters and Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, and Simone de Beauvoir. The primary sources selected to illustrate the themes are well chosen and contrast with each other nicely. However, the brief background material for the selections center around the authors and offer little or no discussion about the selections' relevance to the topics at hand. This book would be best read in a class or group where the texts' meaning in relation to each other can be discussed, but the book can stand alone if the reader is prepared to do some critical thinking.

This work deals with the medical knowledge and beliefs of cultures outside of the United States and Europe. In addition to articles surveying Islamic, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Indian, Egyptian, and Tibetan medicine, the book includes essays on comparing Chinese and western medicine and religion and medicine. Each essay is well illustrated and contains an extensive bibliography.

Follows the advance of western medicine from ancient Greece, through the contributions of the great Islamic physicians, to modern day miracles such as antibiotics, CAT scans and organ transplants. Highlighting the great medical discoveries, contributors cover such topics as the relationship in the Renaissance between medicine and art, the tension between the church and an increasingly secularized medical professional class, epidemics and the geography of disease, and changing attitudes towards childbirth, mental disease, and the doctor-patient relationship. c. Book News Inc.

From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower “A dazzling history of Western ideas.” —The Economist “Mr. Ferguson tells his story with characteristic verve and an eye for the felicitous phrase.” —Wall Street Journal “[W]ritten with vitality and verve . . . a tour de force.” —Boston Globe Western civilization’s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries. How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic—that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors. Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded the killer apps the West once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith in itself. Chronicling the rise and fall of empires alongside clashes (and fusions) of civilizations, Civilization: The West and the Rest recasts world history with force and wit. Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.

Humanistic ecology builds on the interrelatedness of traditions such as magic, medicine, and science, as exemplified in the history of Western civilization in order to integrate forgotten or marginalized pathways to knowledge and well-being.

The latest volume in Joseph Needham's magisterial revelation of China's premodern scientific and technological traditions introduces medicine. Five essays are included by Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen, edited and expanded upon by the editor, Nathan Sivin. The essays offer broad and readable accounts of medicine in culture, including hygiene and preventive medicine, forensic medicine and immunology. Professor Sivin's extensive introduction discusses these essays, placing them in their historical and medical context, and surveys recent medical discoveries from China, Japan, Europe and the United States.