Modern Medicine For Modern Times

The use of honey can be traced back to the Stone Age. Evidence can be found for its nutritional and medicinal use beginning with prehistoric and ancient civilizations. Currently, there is a resurgence of scientific interest in natural medicinal products, such as honey, by researchers, the medical community, and even the general public. Honey in Traditional and Modern Medicine provides a detailed compendium on the medical uses of honey, presenting its enormous potential and its limitations. The book covers honey’s ethnomedicinal uses, chemical composition, and physical properties. It discusses the healing properties of honey, including antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant properties. It also examines the botanical origin of honey, a critical factor in relation to its medicinal use, along with the complex subject of the varying composition of honey. Honey’s antibacterial qualities and other attributes are described in a chapter dedicated to Leptospermum, or Manuka honey, a unique honey with potential for novel therapeutic applications. Chapters explore a variety of medicinal uses for honey, including its healing properties and use in burn and wound management. They review honey’s beneficial effects on medical conditions, such as gastrointestinal disorders, cardiovascular diseases, diabetic ulcers, and cancers as well as in pediatrics and animal health and wellness. The book also examines honey-based formulations, modern methods for chemical analysis of honey, and the history and reality of "mad honey." The final chapters cover honey in the food industry, as a nutrient, and for culinary use.

A fascinating survey of the key moments of post-war medical discovery - fully revised and updated for this new edition

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book breaks new ground by situating animals and their diseases at the very heart of modern medicine. In demonstrating their historical significance as subjects and shapers of medicine, it offers important insights into past animal lives, and reveals that what we think of as ‘human’ medicine was in fact deeply zoological. Each chapter analyses an important episode in which animals changed and were changed by medicine. Ranging across the animal inhabitants of Britain’s zoos, sick sheep on Scottish farms, unproductive livestock in developing countries, and the tapeworms of California and Beirut, they illuminate the multi-species dimensions of modern medicine and its rich historical connections with biology, zoology, agriculture and veterinary medicine. The modern movement for One Health – whose history is also analyzed – is therefore revealed as just the latest attempt to improve health by working across species and disciplines. This book will appeal to historians of animals, science and medicine, to those involved in the promotion and practice of One Health today.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we have become accustomed to medical breakthroughs and conditioned to assume that, regardless of illnesses, doctors almost certainly will be able to help—not just by diagnosing us and alleviating our pain, but by actually treating or even curing diseases, and significantly improving our lives. For most of human history, however, that was far from the case, as veteran medical historian Michael Bliss explains in The Making of Modern Medicine. Focusing on a few key moments in the transformation of medical care, Bliss reveals the way that new discoveries and new approaches led doctors and patients alike to discard fatalism and their traditional religious acceptance of suffering in favor of a new faith in health care and in the capacity of doctors to treat disease. He takes readers in his account to three turning points—a devastating smallpox outbreak in Montreal in 1885, the founding of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School, and the discovery of insulin—and recounts the lives of three crucial figures—researcher Frederick Banting, surgeon Harvey Cushing, and physician William Osler—turning medical history into a fascinating story of dedication and discovery. Compact and compelling, this searching history vividly depicts and explains the emergence of modern medicine—and, in a provocative epilogue, outlines the paradoxes and confusions underlying our contemporary understanding of disease, death, and life itself.

Considerable progress has been made in our healthcare system, in particular with respect to sensitive diagnostic tools, reagents and very effective and precise drugs. On the other hand, high-throughput screening technology can screen vast numbers of compounds against an array of targets in a very short time, and leads thus - tained can be further explored. In developing countries, the exploding population exerts pressure not only on natural resources but also on the human population - self, whose members strive to become successful and advance in society. This leads to increased blood pressure, anxiety, obesity-associated lipid disorders, cardiov- cular diseases and diabetes. Most of these diseases result in disturbed family life, including sexual behaviour. Despite technological developments, herbal drugs still occupy a preferential place in a majority of the population in the Third World and terminal patients in the West. Herbal drugs, in addition to being cost effective and easily accessible, have been used since time immemorial and have passed the test of time without having any side effects. The multitarget effects of herbs (holistic approaches) are the fun- mental basis of their utilization. This approach is already used in traditional systems of medicine like Ayurveda, which has become more popular in the West in recent years. However, the integration of modern science with traditional uses of herbal drugs is of the utmost importance if ones wishes to use ancient knowledge for the betterment of humanity.

Insightful, informed, and at times controversial in its conclusions, A Short History of Medicine offers an exceptional introduction to the major and many minor facets of its subject. In this lively, learned, and wholly engrossing volume, F. González-Crussi presents a brief yet authoritative five-hundred-year history of the science, the philosophy, and the controversies of modern medicine. While this illuminating work mainly explores Western medicine over the past five centuries, González-Crussi also describes how modern medicine’s roots extend to both Greco-Roman antiquity and Eastern medical traditions. Covered here in engaging detail are the birth of anatomy and the practice of dissections; the transformation of surgery from a gruesome art to a sophisticated medical specialty; a short history of infectious diseases; the evolution of the diagnostic process; advances in obstetrics and anesthesia; and modern psychiatric therapies and the challenges facing organized medicine today. Written by a renowned author and educator, this book gives us the very essence of our search to mitigate suffering, save lives, and unlock the mysteries of the human animal. “[González-Crussi fuses] science, literature, and personal history into highly civilized artifacts.” –The Washington Post, on There Is a World Elsewhere

A startling narrative revealing the impressive medical and surgical advances that quickly developed as solutions to the horrors unleashed by World War I. The Great War of 1914-1918 burst on the European scene with a brutality to mankind not yet witnessed by the civilized world. Modern warfare was no longer the stuff of chivalry and honor; it was a mutilative, deadly, and humbling exercise to wipe out the very presence of humanity. Suddenly, thousands upon thousands of maimed, beaten, and bleeding men surged into aid stations and hospitals with injuries unimaginable in their scope and destruction. Doctors scrambled to find some way to salvage not only life but limb. The Great War and the Birth of Modern Medicine provides a startling and graphic account of the efforts of teams of doctors and researchers to quickly develop medical and surgical solutions. Those problems of gas gangrene, hemorrhagic shock, gas poisoning, brain trauma, facial disfigurement, broken bones, and broken spirits flooded hospital beds, stressing caregivers and prompting medical innovations that would last far beyond the Armistice of 1918 and would eventually provide the backbone of modern medical therapy. Thomas Helling’s description of events that shaped refinements of medical care is a riveting account of the ingenuity and resourcefulness of men and women to deter the total destruction of the human body and human mind. His tales of surgical daring, industrial collaboration, scientific discovery, and utter compassion provide an understanding of the horror that laid a foundation for the medical wonders of today. The marvels of resuscitation, blood transfusion, brain surgery, X-rays, and bone setting all had their beginnings on the battlefields of France. The influenza contagion in 1918 was an ominous forerunner of the frightening pandemic of 2020-2021. For anyone curious about the true terrors of war and the miracles of modern medicine, this is a must read.

A shocking story of medical brutality perfomed in the name of psychiatric medicine.