Physicians, Plagues and Progress

Allan Chapman

Description

Since the dawn of time, man has sought to improve his health and that of his neighbour. The human race, around the world, has been on a long and complex journey, seeking to find out how our bodies work, and what heals them. Embarking on a four-thousand-year odyssey, science historian Allan Chapman brings to life the origin and development of medicine and surgery. Writing with pace and rigorous accuracy, he investigates how we have battled against injury and disease, and provides a gripping and highly readable account of the various victories and discoveries along the way. Drawing on sources from across Europe and beyond, Chapman discusses the huge contributions to medicine made by the Greeks, the Romans, the early medieval Arabs, and above all by Western Christendom, looking at how experiment, discovery, and improving technology impact upon one another to produce progress. This is a fascinating, insightful read, enlivened with many colourful characters and memorable stories of inspired experimenters, theatrical surgeons, student pranks, body-snatchers, 'mad-doctors', quacks, and charitable benefactors.

Sujets

• Histoire
• History of science

Informations

• Publié par: Lion Hudson
• Date de parution: 18 novembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780745970400
• Langue: English

Extrait

Using clarity of structure and a warm, engaging style, Allan Chapman brings us an elegant and accessible new introduction to the history of Western medicine.
Caroline Rance, author of The History of Medicine in One Hundred Facts
This is medical history for the layman - and very good it is, too. Chapman s coverage is, as we have come to expect, comprehensive, covering everything that has contributed to the knowledge and treatment of physical and mental disorders. Highly recommended.
Derek Wilson, historian
This thoroughly enjoyable book provides a comprehensive and highly compelling account of the way in which the pioneers of western medicine have, with equal measures of luck and judgement, driven its development from what was once no more than glorified sorcery to its current place as an established cutting edge science.
Dr Simon Atkins, author and medical practitioner
This is a fascinating and comprehensive tour of the history of medicine and health care from prehistory to the modern world. This detailed overview of thousands of years of medical history is constantly brought to life through fascinating and arresting examples It also reveals the complex interaction of different religious and scientific concepts and outlooks across time.
It explodes myths, such as the commonly held assumption of little progress being made in western medicine and surgery in the Middle Ages. Or that everyone in Western Europe before the Early Modern Period was dirty. And in a modern age of tension between aspects of the Western and Islamic world we are rightly reminded of the valuable contribution made to medical progress through the intellectual interaction of Christian and Islamic culture after the fall of the Roman Empire, as they both sought to preserve and advance the medical knowledge that they had inherited from the Classical world of Greece and Rome.
Throughout, it is fast paced, insightful and engaging. This excellent book provides a one volume overview that helps one see the medical wood from the trees over a long period of time. A great book and a most enjoyable read.
Martyn Whittock, historian
Also by Allan Chapman:
Stargazers: Copernicus, Galileo, the Telescope and the Church (Lion Hudson, 2014).
Slaying the Dragons: Destroying Myths in the History of Science and Faith (Lion Hudson, 2013).
England s Leonardo: Robert Hooke and the Seventeenth-Century Scientific Revolution (Institute of Physics, 2005).
Mary Somerville and the World of Science (Canopus Press, Bath, 2004; reprint Springer, 2015).
Gods in the Sky. Astronomy, Religion, and Culture from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Channel 4 Books, Pan Macmillan, 2002).
The Medicine of the People. Popular Medicine in Britain before the NHS (Aeneas Press, Chichester, 2001).
The Victorian Amateur Astronomer. Independent Astronomical Research in Britain, 1820-1920 (Wiley-Praxis, 1998).
A LLAN C HAPMAN
Physicians, Plagues and Progress
T HE HISTORY of W ESTERN M EDICINE from A NTIQUITY to A NTIBIOTICS
Text copyright 2016 Allan Chapman This edition copyright 2016 Lion Hudson
The right of Allan Chapman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Allan Chapman in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Lion Books an imprint of Lion Hudson plc Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, England www.lionhudson.com/lion
ISBN 978 0 7459 6895 7 e-ISBN 978 0 7459 7040 0
First edition 2016
Acknowledgments Extracts from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown s patentee, Cambridge University Press.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover image: Design Pics Inc/Alamy Stock Photo
To Rachel: Wife, Scholar, and Best Friend her price is far above rubies
(Proverbs 31:10)
Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface

1 Physicians, Priests, and Folk Healers

Ancient doctors

Medicine in Egypt and other ancient cultures

Moses and the lepers: A saga from Sinai to Scandinavia 9

Hippocrates of Cos: Rational medicine, ethics, and the Oath of c. 430 BC

Aristotle (384-322 BC ) and the nature of living things

2 Galen: Surgeon to the Gladiators

Aelius Claudius Galenus of Pergamum: Surgeon, showman, and public anatomist, AD 129-200/216

Galen the anatomist and physiologist

Galen s physiology

Roman surgery

Celsus and his Encyclopedia of c. AD 30

Galen s influence: Medicine, ethics, religion, and teaching across fifteen centuries

3 Arabia: The First Fruits of Medieval Medicine

Baghdad and The House of Wisdom

Fire and water: Transformative forces

Jabir (Geber) and Rhazes: Chemistry and medicine

I suppose that Avycen /Wroot nevere in no canon (Chaucer)

Albucasis and Arabic surgery

Arabic medicine in retrospect

4 Divine Light: Seeing and Perceiving in the Middle Ages

The anatomy of perception: What was seeing believed to be?

Rainbows, colours, and perspective: Medieval Europe s new key to physics

Unravelling the colours of the rainbow: Medieval Europe s great discovery

Spectacles: The invention that changed the world

Couching for cataract: Albucasis and medieval eye surgery

The eye as an optical projector

5 Rahere the Jester Meets St Bartholomew

Early medieval care: Leech books and herbals

Salerno, near Naples: Europe s first hospital and medical school

The founding of St Bartholomew s Hospital in twelfth-century London

Cure of body and cure of soul: How clean were medieval people?

6 Spiritual Inspiration, Miracle, Possession, Mental Illness, and the Brain

Discerning clinical illness from spiritual states

Epilepsy and the Hippocratic tradition in medieval Europe

Cells, chambers, and fluid flows: The medieval explanation for brain function

Margery Kempe (n e Burnham or Brunham) and religious visionaries

Bedlam : A place of asylum for the distressed?

7 In Time of Plague

Epidemics: Sin, nature, and the plague of the Philistines

The Black Death of 1347 and beyond

A miscellany of medieval maladies

8 Medicine and Surgery in High Medieval Europe, 1200-1500, Part 1: Medicine and Anatomy in Europe s Medieval Universities and Beyond

Population growth, prosperity, and innovation

Teaching anatomy, challenging myth, and the status of experimental knowledge

Pus: Laudable or a liability?

Theodoric Borgognoni of Lucca: Surgeon, hygienist, friar, and bishop

The first academic medical schools: A European innovation

Mondino de Liuzzi of Bologna and his Anathomia

9 Medicine and Surgery in High Medieval Europe, 1200-1500, Part 2: Guy de Chauliac and the Great Surgery of 1363

A scientific physician at the papal court in Avignon

Chirurgia Magna , or the Great Surgery : A medical encyclopedia for future ages

Guy de Chauliac: Victim, survivor, and student of the bubonic plague

So was medieval surgery barbaric?

10 Prince Hal and the Surgeons: The Rise of Medical Professionalism in England after 1300

John of Arderne: Master surgeon of the age of Chaucer

An unfortunate incident of an arrow in the face

Towton Man: Sophisticated facial repair surgery in early fifteenth-century England

The anonymous surgeon of HMS Mary Rose in 1545

Gunpowder, God, and Europe s surgical renaissance

The Royal College of Physicians and the Worshipful Company of Barbers and Surgeons

11 Antiquity Found Wanting in Renaissance Italy: Andreas Vesalius and His Influence

Renaissance Italy and the lesser circulation of the blood: Andreas Vesalius, Padua, and the new anatomy of the Renaissance

The art of the anatomical illustrator

Vesalius and his De Fabrica of 1543

Realdo Colombo, the Vesalian tradition, and the secrets of the heart

Ambrose Par : Renaissance master surgeon

12 William Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood

Origins and education

Harvey establishes his professional career in London

Of hearts, paradoxes, and purposes: Harvey s road to the blood circulation

Announcing the whole-body circulation of the blood in 1628

Therapeutic innovations around Harvey s time

13 The Neurologist and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Part 1: The Oxford Experimental Club

The hanging of Anne Greene

Dr Thomas Willis of Oxford: Pioneer of neurology

Fermentation, fevers, and chemistry

Arthur Coga and the sheep: Experiments with blood and circulation

14 The Neurologist and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Part 2: Brains, Minds, and Souls in Seventeenth-Century England

The Reverend Robert Burton: Anatomist of Melancholy

Thomas Willis and his circle

Death by lightning in

Fathoming the working of the mind in seventeenth-century England

Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon, Doctor Willis, and the soul

15 Breathing and Burning: Cardiology, Chemistry, and Combustion

The breath of life

Dr John Mayow: Air, fire, blood, and life tested in the laboratory

Robert Hooke and the dog

Richard Lower, Tractatus de Corde , and the foundation of cardiology

Oxford s enterprising apothecaries

16 John Wesley s Primitive Physick and the British Priest-Physician

The Reverend John Ward, MA: Experimentalist and Shakespeare anecdote collector

John Wesley and simple medicine for the common man

The country vicar who paved the way for aspirin

Stephen Hales, Sydney Smith, and other medical clergymen

17 The Duty of Care: New Hospitals, Charities, and Medical Innovation in the Eighteenth Century

A new tide of hospitals: London

New hospitals across Great Britain

The hospital as a museum of disea