Kill or Cure: An Illustrated History of Medicine [Kindle Edition]
Author: Steve Parker | Language: English | ISBN: B00GB3BLT4 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Kill or Cure: An Illustrated History of Medicine
Download electronic versions of selected books Kill or Cure: An Illustrated History of Medicine [Kindle Edition] for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
Download electronic versions of selected books Kill or Cure: An Illustrated History of Medicine [Kindle Edition] for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
Kill or Cure, a lavishly illustrated new history from DK, recounts the quest of doctors and scientists through the ages to tame and conquer mankind's ever-enduring enemies: disease, injury, and death. Sometimes misguided, sometimes inspired, always doggedly determined, the great scientific minds of every generation have battled the unknown within our bodies, developing potions, drugs, and therapies in a quest to heal and cure.
Beginning with early healers, chance discoveries, technological advancement, and "wonder" drugs, and using panels, timelines, and thematic spreads, Kill or Cure highlights information about human anatomy, surgical instruments, and medical breakthroughs while telling the dramatic tale of medical progress. Diaries, notebooks, and other first-person accounts tell the fascinating stories from the perspective of people who witnessed medical history firsthand. Packed with photographs, diagrams, and visual explanations, Kill or Cure tells the extraordinary tale of medicine through the ages.
- File Size: 171037 KB
- Print Length: 400 pages
- Publisher: DK Publishing; 1 edition (November 1, 2013)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00GB3BLT4
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #185,827 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #78 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Special Topics > History
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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