Roy Sydney Porter

Mankind's battle to stay alive is the greatest of all subjects. This brief, witty and unusual book by Britain's greatest medical historian compresses into a tiny span a lifetime spent thinking about millennia of human ingenuity in the quest to cheat death. Each chapter sums up one of these battlefields (surgery, doctors, disease, hospitals, laboratories and the human body) in a way that is both frightening and elating. Startlingly illustrated, A SHORT HISTORY OF MEDICINE is the ideal present for anyone who is keenly aware of their own mortality and wants to do something about it. It is also a wonderful memorial to one of Penguin's greatest historians.

"In a historical tour be force, Roy Porter takes a critical look at representations of the body in death, disease and health and at images of the healing arts in Britain from the mid-seventeenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. Roy Porter's two key assumptions are, first, that the human body is the chief signifier and communicator of all manner of meanings - religious, moral, political and medical alike - and, second, that pre-scientific medicine was an art which depended heavily on performance, ritual, rhetoric and theatre. In a text at once robustly humorous and learned, Porter argues that great symbolic weight was attached to contrasting conceptions of the healthy and diseased body, and that such ideas were mapped onto antithetical notions of the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. With these images in mind, he explores aspects of being ill alongside the practice of a range of medical specialities, paying particular attention to self-presentations by physicians, surgeons, quacks and others and to changes in practitioners' public identities over time. Armed with a wealth of outrageous anecdotes and satirical imagery, Porter also discusses the wider metaphorical and symbolic meanings of disease and doctoring in Britain in the last 250 years."--BOOK JACKET.

Frank Arthur Vine, the product of am encounter between his mother, Cassie, and an American G.I., is brought up in Coventry, England, after World War II by her six very different sisters and his charismatic grandmother after they decide that his mother is too unstable.

"How have we come to hold our present attitudes towards health, sickness and the medical profession? Roy Porter argues that the outlooks of the age of the Enlightenment were crucially important in the creation of modern thinking about disease, doctors and society. In order to probe the origins, interpretation and significance of such views, he focuses upon one prominent doctor active in England at the close of the eighteenth century, Thomas Beddoes, and examines his challenging, pugnacious, radical and often amusing views on a wide range of issues concerned with the place of illness and medicine in society. Beddoes is particularly interesting, since he was a leading medical scientist, an active political radical, a prolific author, and centre of an intellectual circle that included Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the young Humphry Davy." "Successive chapters examine Beddoes's views about the progress of medical science, the social and psychological causes of sickness in advanced commercial and industrial societies, amongst both the upper and the working classes, the prevalence of quackery, the ills of the medical profession and their reform, and the meaning of sickness for the individual. Beddoes posed the question of what kind of medicine would be needed for a future enlightened, urban society, and the place of the doctor within a democratic order. The failure of the French Revolution gave a pessimistic as well as a progressive cast to Beddoes's vision. Many debates within medicine today continue to echo the topics which Beddoes himself discussed in his ever-trenchant and provocative manner."--BOOK JACKET.

In "A social history of madness", the historian Roy Porter examines the autobiographical writings of the clinically insane--and for the first time, examines them from the point of view of the mad themselves. How do the mad perceive the world they live in, the doctors who treat (or don't treat) them, or their own supposed insanity? What can the ordeal of insanity tell us about the human experience, and about the very foundation of our society?

Dictionary of the concepts or ideas that characterize the core features of recent Western science. Focuses on the last 5 centuries. There is emphasis on historiography and the philosophical and metaphysical principles of science, as well as "those parts of the social and human sciences historically most closely linked with the natural sciences." No biographical entries. Entries are lengthy and contain references and authors' initials. Many cross references. Biographical index.

Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science explores attempts to develop bodies of knowledge about sex from antiquity to the present day. Taking into account cognate sciences like zoology, anatomy, embryology and psychiatry, the volume analyses the shaping over the centuries of disciplines which came by 1900 to be called 'sexology'. Various contributions explore the interfaces between 'high' and 'low' sexual teachings, and the connections and tensions between popular and empirical sexual knowledge on the one hand and overtly scientific formulations. A major concern of the book is to investigate the ideological functions - in terms of group, class and gender - of sexual science, especially when incorporated into systems of legal, medical and political power. Among sexual liberals and radicals it has long been an article of faith that sexual science, sexual liberation and sexual fulfillment will all advance hand-in-hand. With the modern backlash against permissiveness, and against the background of AIDS, such views are being challenged. Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science offers historical perspectives upon such questions.

This text provides an account of the development of medical science in its various branches, and includes discussions of the medical profession and its institutions, and the impact of medicine upon populations, economic development, culture, religions, and thought.

Defines the various categories of medications and describes their effects on the body.

Publisher's description: This volume offers to general and specialist readers alike the fullest and most complete survey of the development of science in the eighteenth century, exploring the implications of the 'scientific revolution' of the previous century and the major new growth-points, particularly in the experimental sciences. It is designed to be read as both a narrative and an interpretation, and also used as a work of reference. While prime attention is paid to western science, space is also given to science in traditional cultures and colonial science. The coverage strikes a balance between analysis of the cognitive dimension of science itself and interpretation of its wider social, economic and cultural significance. The contributors, world leaders in their respective specialities, engage with current historiographical and methodological controversies and strike out on positions of their own.