Walter Gratzer

The author here offers a marvelous smorgasbord of stories taken from the history of nutrition, providing an engaging account of the struggle to find the ingredients of a healthy diet, and the fads and quackery that have waylaid the unwary. The book teems with colorful personalities, a veritable who's who of medical history, from Hippocrates to Pasteur, plus such intriguing figures such as Count Rumford, who argued that since plants got their food from water, soups would make the best meals for us. The author highlights the brilliant flashes of insight as well as the sadly mistaken leaps of logic in the centuries long effort to understand how the body uses food. We see the ingenious experiments used to reveal the workings of the stomach, the chemical analyses that uncovered the nature of proteins, carbohydrates, and vitamins, and the slow recognition that malnutrition lay behind such terrible diseases as scurvy, rickets, beriberi, and pellagra. Along the way, we read about the invention of the tin can (which originally had to be opened with a hammer and chisel), learn why ancient Egyptians had thicker skulls than Persians, and find out about today's fads and fancy diets, some dangerous, others just daft, such as the blood group diet, where you plan your meals around your blood type (people who are type 0 are supposed to eat more meat). Included are anecdotes from the history of medicine and with sharp portraits of the scientists who advanced our understanding of diet and digestion.

"The march of science has never proceeded smoothly. It has been marked through the years by episodes of drama and comedy, of failure as well as triumph, and by outrageous strokes of luck, deserved and undeserved, and sometimes by human tragedy. It has seen deep intellectual friendships, as well as ferocious animosities, and once in a while acts of theft and malice, deceit, and even a hoax or two. Scientists come in all shapes - the obsessive and the dilettantish, the genial, the envious, the preternaturally brilliant and the slow-witted who sometimes see further in the end, the open-minded and the intolerant, recluses and arrivistes. From the death of Archimedes at the hands of an irritated Roman soldier to the concoction of a superconducting witches' brew at the very close of the twentieth century, the stories in Eurekas and Euphorias pour out, told with wit and relish by Walter Gratzer." "Open this book at random and you may chance on the clumsy chemist who breaks a thermometer in a reaction vat and finds mercury to be the catalyst that starts the modern dyestuff industry; or a famous physicist dissolving his gold Nobel Prize medal in acid to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Nazis, recovering it when the war ends; mathematicians and physicists diverting themselves in prison cells, and even in a madhouse, by creating startling advances in their subject. We witness the careers, sometimes tragic, sometimes carefree, of the great women mathematicians, from Hypatia of Syracuse to Sophie Germain in France and Sonia Kovalevskaya in Russia and Sweden, and then Marie Curie's relentless battle with the French Academy. Here, then, a glorious parade unfolds to delight the reader, with stories to astonish, to instruct, and most especially, to entertain."--BOOK JACKET.

Tells the stories of incidents in the history of scientific discovery in which faulty conclusions were reached by scientists who, despite evidence to the contrary, insisted their findings were correct.