Quotes from The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present by Roy Porter. I: The prominence of medicine has lain only in small measure in its ability to make the sick well.

Roy Porter, who died in 2002 aged 51, was said to know more about the 18th century than any then man alive. With a double starred first from Cambridge he joined the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in 1979 and published his 848-page magnum opus “The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present” in 1999. It’s a magnificent book that I am working my way through. Many people, I’ve discovered, own a copy but have not read it. I hope that I might do medical history, the world at large, students of medicine (surely all of us), and Roy a service by posting extracts of his book on my website. I knew Roy slightly. I used to meet him early in the morning in the bike shed of BMA house. He was usually wearing an open shirt that showed his hairy chest and a medallion. One thing I knew about him was that he had five wives, an achievement I thought both magnificent and mad. I remember him give the most wonderful lecture on how many people in…