Medical History III: The Roots of Medicine

“The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present” by Roy Porter was published in 1999. It’s a magnificent 848-page 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. Disease is a social development no less than the medicine that combats it. Many of the worst human diseases were created by proximity to animals. Stunted people are more vulnerable to infections, and it is a striking comment on ‘progress’ that neolithic skeletons are typically some inches shorter than their palaeolithic precursors. Not long ago medicine’s triumph over disease was taken for granted. At the close of the Second World War a sequence of books appeared in Britain under the masthead of The Conquest Series’. These included The Conquest of Disease, The…