Rating:
(7 reviews)
Author: Ira Rutkow
ISBN : B003E6M70I
New from $12.74
Format: PDF, EPUB
Download file now Free Download Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
A timely, authoritative, and entertaining history of medicine in America by an eminent physician
Despite all that has been written and said about American medicine, narrative accounts of its history are uncommon. Until Ira Rutkow’s
Seeking the Cure, there have been no modern works, either for the lay reader or the physician, that convey the extraordinary story of medicine in the United States. Yet for more than three centuries, the flowering of medicine—its triumphal progress from ignorance to science—has proven crucial to Americans’ under-standing of their country and themselves.
Seeking the Cure tells the tale of American medicine with a series of little-known anecdotes that bring to life the grand and unceasing struggle by physicians to shed unsound, if venerated, beliefs and practices and adopt new medicines and treatments, often in the face of controversy and scorn. Rutkow expertly weaves the stories of individual doctors—what they believed and how they practiced—with the economic, political, and social issues facing the nation. Among the book’s many historical personages are Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington (whose timely adoption of a controversial medical practice probably saved the Continental Army), Benjamin Rush, James Garfield (who was killed by his doctors, not by an assassin’s bullet), and Joseph Lister. The book touches such diverse topics as smallpox and the Revolutionary War, the establishment of the first medical schools, medicine during the Civil War, railroad medicine and the beginnings of specialization, the rise of the medical-industrial complex, and the thrilling yet costly advent of modern disease-curing technologies utterly unimaginable a generation ago, such as gene therapies, body scanners, and robotic surgeries.
In our time of spirited national debate over the future of American health care amid a seemingly infinite flow of new medical discoveries and pharmaceutical products, Rutkow’s account provides readers with an essential historic, social, and even philosophical context. Working in the grand American literary tradition established by such eminent writer-doctors as Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Carlos Williams, Sherwin Nuland, and Oliver Sacks, he combines the historian’s perspective with the physician’s seasoned expertise.
Capacious, learned, and gracefully told,
Seeking the Cure will satisfy armchair historians and doctors alike, for, as Rutkow shows, the history of American medicine is a portrait of America itself.
Direct download links available for Free Download Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America
- File Size: 2089 KB
- Print Length: 372 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1416538283
- Publisher: Scribner; 1 edition (April 13, 2010)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B003E6M70I
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #474,769 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Free Download Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America
I was rereading a wonderful old novel by H. G. Wells, "The History of Mr. Polly." Mr. Polly's father dies, and Wells says: "...the local practitioner still clung to his theory that it was imagination he suffered from, but compromised in the certificate with the appendicitis that was then so fashionable." Why was appendicitis "fashionable?"
If someone asked you to fill in the blank quickly in the sentence "The surgeon performed an _________" you would probably say "appendectomy." Yet it isn't such a terribly common operation today. Why is it the ur-operation, the one always used for purposes of hypothetical illustration. Why appendectomies?
I saw "Seeking the Cure" and dipped into it to see whether it had an answer. It did, or at least as close to an answer as you'd ever get. It was a confluence of events. I hadn't realized that abdominal surgery had once been a medical taboo, with a nearly 100% mortality rate. Antisepsis ("Listerism") and anesthesia made it safe. It had once been extremely difficult to diagnose. I hadn't really thought of centrifuges, microscopes and blood counts as being a breakthrough in modern technology, but of course they were, part of the medical technology revolution that emerged from World War I. And they made it possible to diagnose appendicitis reliably. And there was one influential surgeon who promoted the idea that it was a surgeon's disease, that appendicitis "belonged to" the surgeon. Hospitals and surgeons found appendectomies to be lucrative, and they became almost a fad; Rutkow cites a hospital in which 1/5th of all operations performed were appendectomies.
Well, I was hooked. The book fascinated me.