Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change [Paperback]

Rene Dubos (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0813512603 | ISBN-13: 978-0813512600 | Publication Date: October 1, 1987

'Complete freedom from disease and from struggle is almost incompatible with the process of living, ' Rene Dubos asserted in this classic essay on ecology and health. All the accomplishments of science and technology, he argued, will not bring the utopian dream of universal well-being, because they ignore the dynamic process of adaptation to a constantly changing environment that every living organism must face.

Product Details

• Paperback: 282 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press (October 1, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813512603
• ISBN-13: 978-0813512600
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #944,489 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mind changer by a great author, April 23, 2001

By 

Stewart Brand (Sausalito, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change (Paperback)

Rene Dubos, a doc, was one of the first and most influential environmentalists and also bent medicine. This book established that disease is PART of health---not in some goopy self-awareness way but as an inherent part of a system remaining able to correct itself and restore dynamic homeostasis.

Four stars only because it might be a little dated by now, but no one has attempted to surpass what Dubos accomplished.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Correlations and Causations, oh my!, March 6, 2009

By 

Nada O'Neal "noneal" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change (Paperback)

I'm so grateful to have happened upon this work. It could stand to be edited a bit - it gets very repetitive and almost circular - but the first couple of chapters are strong, brilliant, enlightening. Two achievements stand out:

1) Dubos has some of the best illustrations of the cyclic/repetitive nature of social thought. He offers a very clear interpretation of meta-medicine since the early Greeks in the Western world, with some decent insights about non-Western cultures as well. (Remember that this book was written in 1959; here's some salt, take a grain of it.)

2) He has a great overall critique of our philosophy of causation in the medical sciences, with a specific focus on the relation between microbial parasites and disease. We know that bronchitis, for example, is caused by certain bacilli, but we also discover that, killing off those bacilli, the patient won't necessarily get better; another infection can take hold. Conversely, and I didn't realize this before reading Mirage of Health, essentially every European urbanite in the 19th century was infected with tuberculosis - but only "were consumptive", became ill. He points out that obliterating bacterial competition is neither possible, desirable, nor necessary, which is on the one hand, so very interesting in its ivory tower way, and on the other hand, so very important. Drug-resistant TB is worsening the world over, from Russia to South Africa to Haiti, and the only thing that consistently works are comprehensive programs that don't just drug the patient, don't just treat the whole patient, but treat the community and environment as a whole. I'm not really interested in being alarmist - "we'll find ourselves in a whole heap of trouble if we don't listen!! zomg" - but the possibility to prevent human suffering is enormous.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars indispensable, November 8, 2009

By 

jon grife (maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change (Paperback)

amazing and wonderful. extremely interesting reading for anyone interested in humanity, disease, science and history. what a brilliant thinker and synthesizer. i can't wait to read his other works. i couldn't put this book down.