The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine

The book is very nice with color pictures and a extend narrative about the topics. It lacks a little more details and depth in some areas and cut down in other areas in which the length makes the reading boring after a while since I have the impression that I keep reading about the same. In general is a good book to learn basic history of medicine and some of the illustration makes the book a more attractive for the reader. Good price for what I got.

This book was favorable in my opinion. It traces the history and interrelation of disease, health and medicine over more than 2000 years. It is a chronological sotry of the key developments and events in medical history from antiquity onwards, while at the same time engaging with the issues, discoveries and controversies that have beset and characterized medical progress. The Chapters include: The hisory of disease, the rise of medicine, what is disease? Primary care, Medical science, Hospitals and surgery, drug treatment and the rise of drug use, mental illness, medicine, society, and the state and looking into the future for health care.

I think this book offers a good overview of medical history with a fairly broad reach. It covers many different cultures and famous physicians with what seems to be a good historical account. It is fairly straightfoward reading that doesn't have much of the little historical tidbits that make some history of medicine texts really interesting. It read more like a good textbook and is a good starting place in your learning of medical history.

I decided, given the variation in literature available, to read and review three books on medicine by Roy Porter at once. These are this one, the Cambridge Illustrated History: Medicine the other two are - "The Greatest Benefit of Mankind" and "Gout, the Patrician Maladay". I thought this was the best approach as people might be looking for a reference work to buy and trying to toss up between which one to get and what the advantages and disadvantages of buying one of these would be. Well for the first two of these. I read "Gout" because it offered a view of Porter's work in a more focussed subject in contrast with the two other generalised works. So if you are interested in comparing and contrasting you can read the other reviews on my review page. I've offered some comments on the other two works here in this review though.The Cambridge History is divided into ten chapters, four of which have been written by Porter himself (he is editor of the whole book). Each chapter is independent of the others and follows one quite broad topic. This means you might read over the same historical period more than one chapter. The subjects include such as 'History of Disease', 'Rise in Medicine', 'Hospitals'The great advantage of this book over the other two mentioned is that it has been liberally illustrated in both colour and black white pictures. They intersperse the text all the way through - and this sort of socio-medical history very much benefits from this sort of treatment. It provides both support for the text and makes for easy reading. The text itself isn't too bogged down in technically yawnable detail, Porter himself is pretty readable, but at the same time it is not a light-weight work written simply to gratify a tabloid market. Naturally, because of constraints of size, it is neither heavy on statistics, nor is their room to fully develop some of the historical points which are made. As a matter of interest I compared some subjects in this work with Porter's other book which he wrote a year later "The Greatest Benefit to Mankind". And in detail the 'The Greatest Benefit.." certainly wins out - but it is twice as long as this one so simply has more room to supply detail.What I enjoyed most about this book is that it is; 1 - Lavishly illustrated and in colour.I'm not sure if a picture does indeed paint a thousand words, but it certainly provides a ready visual cue. 2 - I loved the inserts where subjects were dealt with in side-bars of short separate stories. These included things like 'Transience of Consumptive Beautry", "Nursing becomes professional", Black Death and various biographies.It all goes to make it a better browsable read than the Greatest Benefit to Mankind - it is probably better for younger ages too who will enjoy the illustrations and the interspersing articles. It is difficult to make a decision, if you are choosing to buy one (Greatest Benefit vs Cambridge Illustrated) but I notice in soft cover both are quite reasonably priced.

As a general practitioner I always wanted a single,low-priced book on this subject, easy to read, complete, critical and very accurate. And I am not forgetting about the quality of the paper and the printing!! I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in knowing more about the birth, development, breakthroughs and actual state of the healing sciences.