Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine

A definate read!


A quick and unsettling read   November 13, 2003
 31 out of 31 found this review helpful

In a sense this is a "lite" version of the late Roy Porter's well-received history of medicine from 1997, entitled The Greatest Benefit to Mankind. He is also the editor of The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine (1996) and was until his death professor of social history at University College London.

But let's face it, the history of medicine has not been a pretty story, nor could it have been. Most of history's physicians were flailing about in the dark, the surgeons as sawbones and barbers performing crude amputations and such without the aid of either anaesthetics or disinfectants, the practitioners as faith healers and quacks, dispensing placebos or poisons often without knowing which was which. It wasn't until the late 19th century that the medical profession began to achieve some understanding of the real causes of illness and indeed understand how living things work and how and why they don't work. Porter recalls some of the controversies about the vivisection of cadavers, and arguments about the causes of infectious disease: an argument made difficult because of course the microbes could not be discerned until about the time of Pasteur.

Porter outlines this sobering story from the time of the Greeks to the present day in an objective and easily assimilated style. He organizes the material into eight chapters focusing on Disease, Doctors, The Body, The Laboratory, Therapies, Surgery, The Hospital, and Medicine in Modern Society. Along the way he delves into the politics (some sexual) and into the sociology of medicine around the globe. There are suggestions for Further Reading and an Index.

There are also about 40 rather appalling (some amusing) illustrations from previous centuries in this (for a change) accurately named little tome, showing the horrors of past medical practices. They enliven Porter's text, but you may need a magnifying glass to catch all the nuances--as though you might want to do that!--since some of the prints, while small enough to fit the page are not large enough for the unaided eye.

In short, this is a quick and unsettling read that may make the reader wonder about how future generations will view some of the medical procedures practiced today.


Informative but brief account of medical history   April 25, 2003
 3 out of 3 found this review helpful

This book does not have lots of blood and guts in it. What it does have is a series of linked episodes that together describe the history behind many medical practises still in use today.

The story the book is trying to put across relates to societies attitude to medicine and surgery as well as the treatments that went with them.

It shows that in many ways society is just as prudish as it was hundreds of years ago in how it feels about medical practise.

The book can be read in sections to cover each turn of the medical establishment in line with social prejudice.

An easy read, and a book that can be dipped into a chapter or to at a time for bedtime reading.


A brief and superficial history of medicine   February 27, 2003
 4 out of 7 found this review helpful

In "Blood & Guts", Roy Porter recounts a brief history of medicine, from the the effects of disease on the earliest human populations, through the catastrophic plagues and epidemics that afflicted towns and cities as population densities increased, to the modern day, when people who have never been healthier worry more about their health and spend more money on it than any of their ancestors.
While the historical sections of the book are interesting, though fairly superficial, Porter's treatment of the "socialization of medicine and the medicalization of society" is too perfunctory. There is no discussion of either the benefits or the dangers of increased application of science and technology to drug discovery or surgical technique, nor is there any mention of the rise in iatrogenic (physician-induced) illness or the alienation of patients from their own bodies. It isn't the place of a book like this to proffer models for improved healthcare systems but a discussion of how medicine itself might have developed differently and what difference that would have made to society would be welcome.