Full Description
Erwin H. Ackerknecht's A Short History of Medicine is a concise narrative, long appreciated by students in the history of medicine, medical students, historians, and medical professionals as well as all those seeking to understand the history of medicine. Covering the broad sweep of discoveries from parasitic worms to bacilli and x-rays, and highlighting physicians and scientists from Hippocrates and Galen to Pasteur, Koch, and Roentgen, Ackerknecht narrates Western and Eastern civilization's work at identifying and curing disease. He follows these discoveries from the library to the bedside, hospital, and laboratory, illuminating how basic biological sciences interacted with clinical practice over time. But his story is more than one of laudable scientific and therapeutic achievement. Ackerknecht also points toward the social, ecological, economic, and political conditions that shape the incidence of disease. Improvements in health, Ackerknecht argues, depend on more than laboratory knowledge: they also require that we improve the lives of ordinary men and women by altering social conditions such as poverty and hunger.
This revised and expanded edition includes a new foreword and concluding biographical essay by Charles E. Rosenberg, Ackerknecht's former student and a distinguished historian of medicine. A new bibliographic essay by Lisa Haushofer explores recent scholarship in the history of medicine.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Charles E. Rosenberg
Preface, 1982 Edition
Preface to the First Edition
Why Medical History?
Paleopathology and Paleomedicine
Primitive Medicine
Medicine of Ancient Civilizations
Ancient India and China
Greek Medicine
Greek Medicine
Greek Medicine
Medieval Medicine
Renaissance Medicine
Medicine in the Seventeenth Century
Medicine in the Eigh teenth Century
The Clinical Schools of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
The Basic Sciences during the Nineteenth Century
Clinical Medicine of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
Microbiology
Surgery and Gynecology in the Nineteenth Century
The New Specialism of the Nineteenth Century
Public Health and Professional Developments in the Nineteenth Century
Medicine in the United States Prior to 1900
Epilogue
Concluding Essay. Erwin H. Ackerknecht, Social Medicine, and the History of Medicine
Bibliographic Essay by Lisa Haushofer
Index
