Kill or Cure: An Illustrated History of Medicine Hardcover – October 21, 2013
Author: Steve Parker | Language: English | ISBN: 1465408428 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Kill or Cure: An Illustrated History of Medicine – October 21, 2013
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About the Author
Steve Parker is an author, editor, and consultant specializing in the natural world, biology, technology, and general sciences. He has written more than 200 books and edited or contributed to over 100 more, including The Human Body, Body Atlas, and Eyewitness Medicine, published by DK. He has also written for the BBC, Boots, the Smithsonian Institution, and the WWF.
Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Kill or Cure: An Illustrated History of Medicine – October 21, 2013
- Hardcover: 400 pages
- Publisher: DK ADULT; 1 edition (October 21, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1465408428
- ISBN-13: 978-1465408426
- Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #260,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Kill or Cure is a mostly-good history of the development of medical care -- more inclusive than I had feared it might be, but less inclusive than I had HOPED for! It also reads pretty interestingly in sections where the author had biographical information about people involved in the stage of medical history being developed, but was tedious reading in the earlier sections where such information was not available.
While I applaud Parker's fairly unbiased presentation of medical background from all the world, I was disappointed that he acknowledged so little of the huge contributions Islamic civilization has made in this area of science as in all other scientific areas. Our European-rooted Western civilization tends to seriously shortchange acknowledgment of Islamic contributions to our modern quality of life.
I also felt Parker should have acknowledged more of the shortcomings of modern Western medicine. The problem of drug-resistant disease-causing organisms was barely mentioned-- but it is a serious problem that many fear may undo many of the gains we have currently made in medicine. When a doctor as well trained in Western medicine as Deepak Chopra -- who was a respected part of the prestigious Boston- and Harvard- centered medical system -- walks away from it because of serious lacks in the methods of delivery, that is something to take note of. I, personally, live in a body that reacts extremely atypically to most pharmaceutical drugs, anesthesias, and disinfectants -- and it should be more widely recognized than it is that Western, modern, scientific medicine does NOT work well for every individual.
Kill or Cure: An Illustrated History of Medicine - by Steve Parker
Healing was the prerogative of sorcerers, while in early Greece doctors were considered itinerant curiosities more likely to harm than help. By the sixteenth century, innovative astrology, herbalism, mineralogy, psychotherapy, and faith-healing, while in the modern world medicine has evolved to make it possible for doctors to operate on patients remotely from another continent.
Today, there is a complex array of scanning and imaging options with which to view the inside of the body, but in ancient Egypt such information would have been deemed utterly irrelevant: examining the patient was unheard of at the time when illness was considered to be the work of the gods. Hippocrates, who practiced in ancient Greece and was considered by many to be the father of modern medicine, found himself imprisoned for many years when he rejected the idea that illness was the whim of deities. Yet by the time he died, he had revolutionized the practice of medicine and established the basic foundations of the role of the physician.
Medicine is as old as humankind. More than 50,000 years ago, stone-age, cave-dwelling humans first crushed and infused herbs for their curative properties. Traditional forms of medicine, few of which, sadly are known to written history, evolved on all continents, from the deserts and jungles of Africa to North American plains, South American rain forests, and balmy Pacific Islands.
The earliest records in West Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, China, and India document myriad diseases, healing plants, and surgical procedures. Ancient Egyptians and a complex, hierarchical methods of medicine integrated into their religious beliefs.
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