69 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Splendid piece of work, authoritative and readable, February 23, 2004
This review is from: A Brief History of Disease, Science and Medicine (Hardcover)
Brief this is not, but compared to some dry academic tomes it seems brief. University of Southern California professor Dr. Michael T. Kennedy has the all too rare gift of writing well which he combines with a passion for detail so that this history is packed with the bizarre, the fascinating, the arcane, and the all too often revolting facts of medical delusion, malpractice, and triumph that have characterized the long and tortured history of the healing arts.
Note well that this is a history not only of medicine and disease, but of science as well. The emphasis is on twentieth century developments, which is as it should be since so much has happened in recent times. This is not to say that the more distant past is neglected. Kennedy starts with the pre-history and follows the quest for health through Greek and Roman times to "The Rise of Islam and Arabic Medicine" (Chapter 5) with excursions into ayurvedic medicine (from India) and the traditional Chinese practices from antiquity. He even looks at European health, or the lack thereof, during the Dark and Middle Ages before the rise of science. When he gets to the modern or nearly modern era, Kennedy organizes less by chronology and more by subject matter. Some of the later chapters are about "Cardiac Surgery," "Transplantation," "Psychiatry," etc. I particularly liked the crisp way he dealt with psychoanalytic theory and the inefficacy of psychoanalysis.
Frankly, I don't know if there is anything else quite like this available. The recognized authority on the subject of the history of medicine in English, University College London's late Roy Porter wrote both a popular account, Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine (2002), and a full blown treatment, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (1997) which Kennedy cites. I have read the former and it is to Kennedy's book as Mary Poppins is to Hamlet. There are other histories, but most are either not current or too voluminous or too restricted in content.
Dr. Kennedy shows how various ideas and methods were developed, how they stemmed from, or were in contrast to, earlier methods; and he highlights the personalities of the practitioners as he describes what they did or discovered. He also focuses on patients and their stories. His style is sharp and uncluttered. Sometimes he employs a dry, cynical wit. At other times his report takes on extra-medical aspects that lend depth and familiarity to his portraits, as when, for example, he reports on the tragic death of transplant pioneer, Dr. David Hume. (p. 388)
Here are some examples of the kind of detail that I found fascinating:
"The early Middle Ages saw little consumption of animal protein by the peasants, but legume production, which increased with the agricultural revolution, reduced the dependence on carbohydrates and led to rapid population growth again." (p. 69)
And on the following page: "Women lived shorter lives than men in the Middle Ages...This is attributed to the hazards of childbirth, but also to an iron deficient diet...[because] animal protein was not available."
"...[A]lthough opium offered some relief of pain...until the anesthesia era, speed was the sign of the good surgeon." (p. 85)
"Infectious diseases were uncommon in primitive societies because the available pool of susceptible individuals was too small and the contact with other groups was not common." (p. 87) Indeed, infectious disease is part of the price we pay for agriculture and civilization.
Quoting Freud: "I often console myself with the idea that, even though we achieve so little therapeutically, at least we understand why more cannot be achieved." (p. 401) This is doubly ironic since Freud was even deceived in what he thought he understood. A few pages later Kennedy drily remarks that psychotherapy "is useful in helping adults to deal with life stress. It has little or no role in treating psychosis. The serious mental illnesses are increasingly seen as biological disorders." (p. 424)
The only weakness of this book is that it could have used a more meticulous editor. (The proofreading is excellent.) Kennedy's writing style is fast-forward, actually suggesting to me how medical history might be written had somebody like, say, novelist James M. Cain taken his hand to it. The words just rush down the page. Kennedy has so much to say and he wants to get it all said. Sometimes one has to read a sentence twice since sometimes his tenses are a little eccentric, and parallel construction is not always strictly observed.
There are two indices, one for names, but I notice that the aforementioned Roy Porter, for example, does not appear in either of them. Probably the names in the footnotes were left out. Also the references (545 of them) are collected at the end of each chapter, which is fine, but there is no overall alphabetized bibliography. This is a pet peeve of mine since one has to chase through chapter after chapter to see if a particular work is cited.
However Kennedy more than makes up for this deficiency with what he calls a "Postscript" which is a lightly annotated bibliography organized into the categories, "Recommended Reading," "General Sources," and sources by individual chapters.
Bottom line: the best history of medicine that I have found and a delight to read.
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26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I'm the author, July 31, 2005
This review is from: A Brief History of Disease, Science and Medicine (Hardcover)
I got a chuckle from a recent review by Seven Octaves. It was similar to a review in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Everyone wishes I had added a few hundred pages on their favorite subject. The book was written for medical students and nurses and pre-med students. I have been surprised at the acceptance by non-medical people. The idea was to provide what every young medical student or nurse or pre-med student should know. Salvarsan is of historic significance only. Erlich is important for his concept of the receptor that predicted antibiotics. The Bulletin reviewer would have preferred more on ancient medicine. I agree. But I would need a two volume work. Thanks for all the nice, and not so nice, comments. Even the guy who thinks my writing is terrible.
The hardcover edition is now ( December 2008) going out of print as it has been sold out. Thanks to everyone who bought a copy. A new soft cover version, with the same contents and trade paperback size, will be out in January ( 2009) and will sell for the same price.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting look into the history of medicine - good and bad, February 26, 2004
This review is from: A Brief History of Disease, Science and Medicine (Hardcover)
Personally I always enjoy a historical book that actually discusses history and not some surgically altered history that only reports the things that went right. That is what you get with "A Brief History of Disease, Science & Medicine". Not only do you read about the great advances in medicine but also about the mistakes that were made along the way. Although the book was written with the first year medical student in mind it is easy enough to read and understand by those with only a passing knowledge of basic first aid. Perhaps one sentence from the Forward best describes the writing style - "...it has been written to be read, rather than studied."
Dr. Kennedy states that this book was not widely accepted by the academic presses and so was published independently. It is fairly obvious that one of the reasons this might be the case is his candid examination of the history of medicine. In an age when most practitioners of the medical profession seem to feel that they have perfect knowledge, Dr. Kennedy's book shows that they have often been wrong with tragic results. Take for instance the case of Ignaz Semmelweiss who worked in a hospital where there was a twenty-nine percent mortality rate for women giving birth. Through experimentation and deduction he came to believe that washing your hands between patients and after autopsies would cause this rate to drop. He ordered that hand washing would be done between patients and the rate of death dropped drastically. However, since he had not reason why it worked it was resisted, he eventually resigned (other historians have noted that he was forced to resign) and the doctors returned to their old habits and the old mortality rate. After all it made no sense to them that something they could not see could make any difference. Many people will immediately see the similarities between things like this and modern attitude of medical science as related to alternative therapies - if we don't yet understand how it works then it must not work. Most medical history texts are severely sanitized to keep such historical errors out. So, it is really no surprise that this book, which portrays history as it was, from many primary sources, is not the most popular one among the medical establishment.
Personally, I enjoyed the book but I am one of those who enjoys history from a viewpoint of accuracy - warts and all. Still you should be prepared to have some of your history that you learned in high school discredited. I remember learning that Louis Pasteur invented innoculations to prevent disease in the later 1800's, but the fact is that Charles Maitland and others were doing it in the 1700's. "A Brief History of Disease, Science and Medicine" is a recommended read for anyone interested in the history and progression of medicine.
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