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(6 reviews)
Author: these sellers
ISBN : 0300073860
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Gout has interested medical writers and cultural commentators from the time of Ancient Greece. Historically seen as a disease afflicting upper-class males of superior wit, genius and creativity, it has included among its sufferers Erasmus, the Medici, Edward Gibbon, Samuel Johnson, Immanuel Kant and Robert Browning. Gout has also been the subject of medical folklore, viewed as a disease that protects its sufferers and assure long life. This book investigates the history of gout and through it offers a perspective on medical and social history, sex, prejudice and class and explains why gout was gender specific. The authors investigate medical thinking about gout through the ages, from Hippocrates and Galen through Paracelsus and Harvey to Archibald Garrod in the Victorian era and beyond. They discuss the cultural, moral, religious and personal qualities associated with gout, examining social commentary, personal writings, cartoons and visual arts, and imaginative literature (including novels of Dickens, Thackeray and Joseph Conrad). Weaving together all these threads, the authors provide a disease history that integrates the medical and the moral, the scientific and the humanistic, the verbal and the visual across a wide sweep of time. In an era in which we are interested by the ways that disease and health are represented by medicine and the media, an era in which the dialogue between patients and doctors over the naming and blaming of diseases is more intense than ever, this book offers an historical commnetary on many of our major concerns.
Books with free ebook downloads available Free Download Gout: The Patrician Malady [Hardcover]
- Hardcover: 408 pages
- Publisher: Yale University Press; 1 edition (October 11, 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0300073860
- ISBN-13: 978-0300073867
- Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
Free Download Gout: The Patrician Malady
This is the third review I have written on Socio-medical histories by Roy Porter. I read and reviewed this book, "Gout - the Patrician Malady" at the same time as his more general medical histories "Cambridge Illustrated History: Medicine" - and "The Greatest Benefit to Mankind". I wanted to compare these books with Porter's work on more specific topics. Porter mentions Gout in passing in both his general histories, but I wondered how he would deal with a more specific subject which had the space of an entire book to develop. He certainly brings the same light writing style to this book as he does to his other subjects and I it made fun reading for what at times could have been very dull and dry.
Porter turns a medical subject into a very interesing social history, he overlays the historical recognition of Gout, its rise in prevalance and treatment, as well as the development of it as a fashionable, upper-class ailment very well. He does this by drawing in the literature and art of the times to track its social progress. Porter certainly shows himself a master of the subject. However, I didn't like the way he sectioned the book. It felt clumsy to me. It is in three parts Histories, Cultures and Goutometries and they seemed to overlap especially the last two sections. Although I did love the chapter on Art in 'Goutometries'. Perhaps the most interesting chapter for me was the in the 'Cultures' section "Indian Summer; Romantic and Victorian Gout" which traced the literary tradition against the actual social status of Gout through the nineteenth century using representations of Gout in Disraeli and Austen to George Eliot.