Customer Reviews

The Cambridge World History of Human Disease

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This tome is exhaustive in the diseases it covers and the way it covers them. Kiple provides epidemiological patterns, history and geography, and skeletal manifestations on each of the conditions he and the board of editors describes. What the book lacks in pictures and diagrams, it makes up for in length and completeness of description. A helpful bibliography is provided. This book is well worth the price!

Great book, well thought out. The initial part of the book is chapters and essays on different topics. One critique I have is that the chapters and topics are very much individual entities and do not really flow from one chapter to another. It would be a bit difficult to trace the history of medicine in timeline fashion if you were to read this book. However, I don't think that is really the purpose of the book, and the essays themselves are quite interesting. The second part of the book is disease specific histories, which are pretty good, but a bit inconsistent in depth. Some diseases' histories are documented thoroughly and others are much more "general" in nature. Probably a reflection of the fact that they are written by different people. Nonetheless, a great resource and reference to have in any medical history library.

very good info about a lot of epidemics, etc, but could have been influenced by spiritual and traditional understandings of psychiatric disease such as pellagra or tertiary syphilis - very good info about other cultural influences available to make good decisions about the future, what's worth retaining vs what needs to be controlled by young people

Yes, it's that interesting. The articles are by multiple authors and give a panoply of points of view. I did catch one historian author confuse ventricular insufficiency with (I believe) gastric problems, but not many people have expertise in both medicine and history; we should be grateful that the writers worked hard to give us a much greater perspective on the history of medicine than most people will ever get.

Through most of history, certainly in prehistoric times, healing theories were quite insufficient, crippled by religious interference, peasant cultural values, healers unwilling to accept better methods (when they finally did arrive in the past hundred and fifty years), and the profit motive (you may recall the English doctors who kept secret their obstetrical forceps). Medicine for thousands of years was geared (as now) to extracting money from sick people. It was only in 1920 that doctors in the USA started doing more good than harm with their treatments.

One thing I've learnt is that healing is highly cultural, political even. Did you know that 45% of doctors in NAZI Germany were card-carrying party members? They were trying to cure society. Right.

It may be useful to understand that only individuals may be cured. Societies are hopeless because existing power structures and the sheer momentum of the reproduction of destructive memes and unhealthy living conditions for large segments of most of the world's population make even valid public health measures unlikely to get traction.

It's good to learn that health cannot reasonably be defined. It is simply what someone says it is. Illness goes with life. Fashions in medicine and the consequent profitability of treatment methods come and go. Politics (as we saw in the USA recently) gets in the way of a high quality system of universal health care for a population.

Injuries derive from doing things. Microbial illness derives from failing to keep the body resistant and from allowing germs (and parasites) to enter the body typically from food, water, insects, bites, wounds, aerosol mist, and extreme environmental conditions. Degenerative disease derives from failure to exercise, eat well but modest amounts, reduce stress, have a satisfactory level of social support, refuse to work in hazardous conditions, etc.

We are programmed to die. Many of us are programmed to suffer genetic disease. Women are programmed to suffer difficult or deadly complications in childbearing at least 20% of the time. Men are programmed to seek hazardous activities such as war, mining, tending large animals, travelling long distances, protecting family from danger.

What this book will give the reader is perspective. A quality in short supply in this frenetic world. My major caveat is that the only illustrations of any quantity are on the cover of the book. The interior is short of them. But then, historians like to write and have a graphics poor orientation.