A Literary History of Medicine

Download A Literary History of Medicine PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004545565
Total Pages : 523 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (45 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Literary History of Medicine by : Emilie Savage-Smith

Download or read book A Literary History of Medicine written by Emilie Savage-Smith and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-03-25 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An online, Open Access version of this work is also available from Brill. A Literary History of Medicine by the Syrian physician Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah (d. 1270) is the earliest comprehensive history of medicine. It contains biographies of over 432 physicians, ranging from the ancient Greeks to the author’s contemporaries, describing their training and practice, often as court physicians, and listing their medical works; all this interlaced with poems and anecdotes. These volumes present the first complete and annotated translation along with a new edition of the Arabic text showing the stages in which the author composed the work. Introductory essays provide important background. The reader will find on these pages an Islamic society that worked closely with Christians and Jews, deeply committed to advancing knowledge and applying it to health and wellbeing.

Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century

Download Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000713199
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (7 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century by : Marie Mulvey Roberts

Download or read book Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century written by Marie Mulvey Roberts and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-10 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1993, Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century analyses the close interplay of medicine and literature by paying special attention to questions of body language and the representation of inner life. Although today, medicine and literature are widely seen as falling on different sides of the ‘two cultures’ divide, this was not so in the eighteenth century when doctors, scientists, writers, and artists formed a well-integrated educated elite. Locke, Smollett and Goldsmith were doctors, and physicians such as Erasmus Darwin doubled as poets. Written by leading historians of medicine and eighteenth-century literary critics, this book uncovers the interconnections between medical and psychological theory and ideas of taste, beauty, and genius. Its contributors explore the rich cultural milieu of the period and investigate the ways in which medicine itself contributed to informing a gendered discourse of the world. This book will be of interest to historians, literary scholars and medical historians.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine

Download The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN 13 : 0199546495
Total Pages : 691 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (995 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine by : Mark Jackson

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine written by Mark Jackson and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2011-08-25 with total page 691 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In three sections, the Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine celebrates the richness and variety of medical history around the world. It explore medical developments and trends in writing history according to period, place, and theme.

The Medical Imagination

Download The Medical Imagination PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812294742
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Medical Imagination by : Sari Altschuler

Download or read book The Medical Imagination written by Sari Altschuler and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1872, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "Science does not know its debt to imagination," words that still ring true in the worlds of health and health care today. The checklists and clinical algorithms of modern medicine leave little space for imagination, and yet we depend on creativity and ingenuity for the advancement of medicine—to diagnose unusual conditions, to innovate treatment, and to make groundbreaking discoveries. We know a great deal about the empirical aspects of medicine, but we know far less about what the medical imagination is, what it does, how it works, or how we might train it. In The Medical Imagination, Sari Altschuler argues that this was not always so. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, doctors understood the imagination to be directly connected to health, intimately involved in healing, and central to medical discovery. In fact, for physicians and other health writers in the early United States, literature provided important forms for crafting, testing, and implementing theories of health. Reading and writing poetry trained judgment, cultivated inventiveness, sharpened observation, and supplied evidence for medical research, while novels and short stories offered new perspectives and sites for experimenting with original medical theories. Such imaginative experimentation became most visible at moments of crisis or novelty in American medicine, such as the 1790s yellow fever epidemics, the global cholera pandemics, and the discovery of anesthesia, when conventional wisdom and standard practice failed to produce satisfying answers to pressing questions. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, health research and practice relied on a broader complex of knowing, in which imagination often worked with and alongside observation, experience, and empirical research. In reframing the historical relationship between literature and health, The Medical Imagination provides a usable past for contemporary conversations about the role of the imagination—and the humanities more broadly—in health research and practice today.

The Female Body in Medicine and Literature

Download The Female Body in Medicine and Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1781386544
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (813 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Female Body in Medicine and Literature by : Andrew Mangham

Download or read book The Female Body in Medicine and Literature written by Andrew Mangham and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Female Body in Medicine and Literature features essays that explore literary texts in relation to the history of gynaecology and women’s surgery. Gender studies and feminist approaches to literature have become busy and enlightening fields of enquiry in recent times, yet there remains no single work that fully analyses the impact of women’s surgery on literary production or, conversely, ways in which literary trends have shaped the course of gynaecology and other branches of women’s medicine. This book will demonstrate how fiction and medicine have a long-established tradition of looking towards each other for inspiration and elucidation in questions of gender. Medical textbooks and pamphlets have consistently cited fictional plots and characterisations as a way of communicating complex or ‘sensitive’ ideas. Essays explore historical accounts of clinical procedures, the relationship between gynaecology and psychology, and cultural conceptions of motherhood, fertility, and the female organisation through a broad range of texts including Henry More’s Pre-Existency of the Soul (1659), Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1855), and Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues (1998). The Female Body in Medicine and Literature raises important theoretical questions on the relationship between popular culture, literature, and the growth of women’s medicine and will be required reading for scholars in gender studies, literary studies and the history of medicine. This collection explores the complex intersections between literature and the medical treatment of women between 1600 and 2000. Employing a range of methodologies, it furthers our understanding of the development of women’s medicine and comments on its wider cultural ramifications. Although there has been an increase in critical studies of women’s medicine in recent years, this collection is a key contributor to that field because it draws together essays on a wide range of new topics from varying disciplines. It features, for instance, studies of motherhood, fertility, clinical procedure, and the relationship between gynaecology and psychology. Besides offering essays on subjects that have received a lack of critical attention, the essays presented here are truly interdisciplinary; they explore the complex links between gynaecology, art, language, and philosophy, and underscore how popular art forms have served an important function in the formation of ‘women’s science’ prior to the twenty-first century. This book also demonstrates how a number of high-profile controversies were taken up and reworked by novelists, philosophers, and historians. Focusing on the vexed and convoluted story of women’s medicine, this volume offers new ways of thinking about gender, science, and the Western imagination. List of contributors: Janice Allan, Madeleine K. Davies, Greta Depledge, Laurie Garrison, Joanna Grant, Lori Schroeder Haslem, Dominic Janes, Emma L. Jones, Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Pam Lieske, Andrew Mangham, Emma L. E. Rees, Sheena Sommers, Susan C. Staub, and Carolyn D.Williams.

Teaching Literature and Medicine

Download Teaching Literature and Medicine PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Modern Language Association
ISBN 13 : 1603292810
Total Pages : 414 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (32 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Teaching Literature and Medicine by : Anne Hunsaker Hawkins

Download or read book Teaching Literature and Medicine written by Anne Hunsaker Hawkins and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both the actualities and the metaphorical possibilities of illness and medicine abound in literature: from the presence of tuberculosis in Franz Kafka's fiction or childbed fever in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to disease in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice or in Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska; from the stories of Anton Chekhov and of William Carlos Williams, both doctors, to the poetry of nurses derived from their contrasting experiences. These are just a few examples of the cross-pollination between literature and medicine. It is no surprise, then, that courses in literature and medicine flourish in undergraduate curricula, medical schools, and continuing-education programs throughout the United States and Canada. This volume, in the MLA series Options for Teaching, presents a variety of approaches to the subject. It is intended both for literary scholars and for physicians who teach literature and medicine or who are interested in enriching their courses in either discipline by introducing interdisciplinary dimensions. The thirty-four essays in Teaching Literature and Medicine describe model courses; deal with specific texts, authors, and genres; list readings widely taught in literature and medicine courses; discuss the value of texts in both medical education and the practice of medicine; and provide bibliographic resources, including works in the history of medicine from classical antiquity.

Seeking the Cure

Download Seeking the Cure PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1439171734
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (391 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Seeking the Cure by : Ira Rutkow

Download or read book Seeking the Cure written by Ira Rutkow and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-04-13 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely, authoritative, and entertaining history of medicine in America by an eminent physician Despite all that has been written and said about American medicine, narrative accounts of its history are uncommon. Until Ira Rutkow’s Seeking the Cure, there have been no modern works, either for the lay reader or the physician, that convey the extraordinary story of medicine in the United States. Yet for more than three centuries, the flowering of medicine—its triumphal progress from ignorance to science—has proven crucial to Americans’ under-standing of their country and themselves. Seeking the Cure tells the tale of American medicine with a series of little-known anecdotes that bring to life the grand and unceasing struggle by physicians to shed unsound, if venerated, beliefs and practices and adopt new medicines and treatments, often in the face of controversy and scorn. Rutkow expertly weaves the stories of individual doctors—what they believed and how they practiced—with the economic, political, and social issues facing the nation. Among the book’s many historical personages are Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington (whose timely adoption of a controversial medical practice probably saved the Continental Army), Benjamin Rush, James Garfield (who was killed by his doctors, not by an assassin’s bullet), and Joseph Lister. The book touches such diverse topics as smallpox and the Revolutionary War, the establishment of the first medical schools, medicine during the Civil War, railroad medicine and the beginnings of specialization, the rise of the medical-industrial complex, and the thrilling yet costly advent of modern disease-curing technologies utterly unimaginable a generation ago, such as gene therapies, body scanners, and robotic surgeries. In our time of spirited national debate over the future of American health care amid a seemingly infinite flow of new medical discoveries and pharmaceutical products, Rutkow’s account provides readers with an essential historic, social, and even philosophical context. Working in the grand American literary tradition established by such eminent writer-doctors as Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Carlos Williams, Sherwin Nuland, and Oliver Sacks, he combines the historian’s perspective with the physician’s seasoned expertise. Capacious, learned, and gracefully told, Seeking the Cure will satisfy armchair historians and doctors alike, for, as Rutkow shows, the history of American medicine is a portrait of America itself.

Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press

Download Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474405614
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (744 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press by : Megan Coyer

Download or read book Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press written by Megan Coyer and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture, which served as a significant medium for the dissemination and exchange of medical and literary ideas throughout Britain, the colonies, and beyond. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press explores the relationship between the medical culture of Romantic-era Scotland and the periodical press by examining several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood?s Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential and innovative literary periodical of the era.

Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine

Download Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300189435
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine by : Roger Cooter

Download or read book Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine written by Roger Cooter and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV A collection of ten essays paired with substantial prefaces, this book chronicles and contextualizes Roger Cooter’s contributions to the history of medicine. Through an analysis of his own work, Cooter critically examines the politics of conceptual and methodological shifts in historiography. In particular, he examines the “double bind” of postmodernism and biological or neurological modeling that, together, threaten academic history. To counteract this trend, suggests Cooter, historians must begin actively locating themselves in the problems they consider. The essays and commentaries constitute a kind of contour map of history’s recent trends and trajectories—its points of passage to the present—and lead both to a critical account of the discipline’s historiography and to an examination of the role of intellectual frameworks and epistemic virtues in the writing of history. /div

Diagnosing Literary Genius

Download Diagnosing Literary Genius PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 0801876893
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (18 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Diagnosing Literary Genius by : Irina Sirotkina

Download or read book Diagnosing Literary Genius written by Irina Sirotkina and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-04-30 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the Modern Language Association The vital place of literature and the figure of the writer in Russian society and history have been extensively studied, but their role in the evolution of psychiatry is less well known. In Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930, Irina Sirotkina explores the transformations of Russian psychiatric practice through its relationship to literature. During this period, psychiatrists began to view literature as both an indicator of the nation's mental health and an integral part of its well-being. By aligning themselves with writers, psychiatrists argued that the aim of their science was not dissimilar to the literary project of exploring the human soul and reflecting on the psychological ailments of the age. Through the writing of pathographies (medical biographies), psychiatrists strengthened their social standing, debated political issues under the guise of literary criticism, and asserted moral as well as professional claims. By examining the psychiatric engagement with the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and the decadents and revolutionaries, Sirotkina provides a rich account of Russia's medical and literary history during this turbulent revolutionary period.

History of Medicine

Download History of Medicine PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 0802095569
Total Pages : 521 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (2 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis History of Medicine by : Jacalyn Duffin

Download or read book History of Medicine written by Jacalyn Duffin and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jacalyn Duffin's History of Medicine has for ten years been one of the leading texts used to teach medical and nursing students the history of their profession. It has also been widely used in history courses and by general readers. An accessible overview of medical history, this new edition is greatly expanded, including more information on medicine in the United States, Great Britain, and in other European countries. The book continues to be organized conceptually around the major fields of medical endeavor such as anatomy, pharmacology, obstetrics, and psychiatry and has grown to include a new chapter on public health. Years of pedagogic experience, medical developments, and reader feedback have led to new sections throughout the book on topics including bioethics, forensics, genetics, reproductive technology, clinical trials, and recent outbreaks of BSE, West Nile Virus, SARS, and anthrax. Up to date and filled with pithy examples and teaching tools such as a searchable online bibliography, History of Medicine continues to demonstrate the power of historical research to inform current health care practice and enhance cultural understanding.

The Cambridge History of Medicine

Download The Cambridge History of Medicine PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521864267
Total Pages : 11 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (218 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Cambridge History of Medicine by : Roy Porter

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Medicine written by Roy Porter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-05 with total page 11 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the backdrop of unprecedented concern for the future of health care, 'The Cambridge History of Medicine' surveys the rise of medicine in the West from classical times to the present. Covering both the social and scientific history of medicine, this volume traces the chronology of key developments and events.

A Literary History of Medicine

Download A Literary History of Medicine PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789004696556
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (965 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Literary History of Medicine by : Emilie Savage-Smith

Download or read book A Literary History of Medicine written by Emilie Savage-Smith and published by . This book was released on 2024-03-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Literary History of Medicine offers a complete, annotated translation along with a new edition of the celebrated, informative and entertaining history of medicine - the first of its kind - by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah (d. 1270), together with several introductory essays.

Western Medicine

Download Western Medicine PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 9780199248131
Total Pages : 612 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (481 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Western Medicine by : Irvine Loudon

Download or read book Western Medicine written by Irvine Loudon and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Follows the advance of western medicine from ancient Greece, through the contributions of the great Islamic physicians, to modern day miracles such as antibiotics, CAT scans and organ transplants. Highlighting the great medical discoveries, contributors cover such topics as the relationship in the Renaissance between medicine and art, the tension between the church and an increasingly secularized medical professional class, epidemics and the geography of disease, and changing attitudes towards childbirth, mental disease, and the doctor-patient relationship. c. Book News Inc.

Literary Medicine: Brain Disease and Doctors in Novels, Theater, and Film

Download Literary Medicine: Brain Disease and Doctors in Novels, Theater, and Film PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers
ISBN 13 : 3318022713
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (18 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Literary Medicine: Brain Disease and Doctors in Novels, Theater, and Film by : J. Bogousslavsky

Download or read book Literary Medicine: Brain Disease and Doctors in Novels, Theater, and Film written by J. Bogousslavsky and published by Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An amazing and fascinating look at neurological conditions in fiction and film Classical and modern literature is full of patients with interesting neurological, cognitive, or psychiatric diseases, often including detailed and accurate descriptions, which suggests the authors were inspired by observations of real people. In many cases these literary portrayals of diseases even predate their formal identification by medical science. Fictional literature encompasses nearly all kinds of disorders affecting the nervous system, with certain favorites such as memory loss and behavioral syndromes. There are even unique observations that cannot be found in scientific and clinical literature because of the lack of appropriate studies. Not only does literature offer a creative and humane look at disorders of the brain and mind, but just as authors have been inspired by medicine and real disorders, clinicians have also gained knowledge from literary depictions of the disorders they encounter in their daily practice. This book provides an amazing and fascinating look at neurological conditions, patients, and doctors in literature and film in a way which is both nostalgic and novel.

The New York Times Book of Medicine

Download The New York Times Book of Medicine PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Union Square & Co.
ISBN 13 : 145490206X
Total Pages : 698 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (549 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The New York Times Book of Medicine by : Gina Kolata

Download or read book The New York Times Book of Medicine written by Gina Kolata and published by Union Square & Co.. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 698 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we live longer, healthier lives than ever before in history—a transformation due almost entirely to tremendous advances in medicine. This change is so profound, with many major illnesses nearly wiped out, that its hard now to imagine what the world was like in 1851, when the New York Times began publishing. Treatments for depression, blood pressure, heart disease, ulcers, and diabetes came later; antibiotics were nonexistent, viruses unheard of, and no one realized yet that DNA carried blueprints for life or the importance of stem cells. Edited by award-winning writer Gina Kolata, this eye-opening collection of 150 articles from the New York Times archive charts the developing scientific insights and breakthroughs into diagnosing and treating conditions like typhoid, tuberculosis, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimers, and AIDS, and chronicles the struggles to treat mental illness and the enormous success of vaccines. It also reveals medical mistakes, lapses in ethics, and wrong paths taken in hopes of curing disease. Every illness, every landmark has a tale, and the newspapers top reporters tell each one with perceptiveness and skill.

A History of Medicine in 50 Objects

Download A History of Medicine in 50 Objects PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781770857186
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (571 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A History of Medicine in 50 Objects by : Gill Paul

Download or read book A History of Medicine in 50 Objects written by Gill Paul and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for A History of Music in 50 Instruments, also in this series: Wilkinson's history unfolds like a symphonic work with instrument makers, composers and virtuosic performers picking up these incredible creations and exposing their beauty and capability. To open it up is to be instantly hooked. -- Publishers Weekly A History of Medicine in 50 Objects takes readers on a 12,000-year journey to explore significant items that have advanced medical knowledge and practice. The fifty objects range from the everyday (a bottle of Aspirin) to singular medical advances (heart transplant pioneer Christian Bernard on the cover of TIME magazine). The objects are presented chronologically and described in two to four pages with illustrations, 150 beautiful archive images in all. Fact boxes note Location, Date, and Field, for example, epidemiology. Engaging text describes the artifacts in their social and cultural context, as well as their role in disease treatment and prevention. Centuries of invention and risk-taking have saved lives and advanced life expectancy. The first object is a Neolithic skull (ca 10,000 BCE) showing evidence of trephination, a hole deliberately cut into the skull of a living person and likely the first surgical practice. It was done widely well into the Renaissance, with surprising success, and is still done today, though rarely. The last object, like many others, was borne of tragedy. It is the protective gear designed for medical workers during the 2014 Ebola virus outbreak. The objects come in all shapes and sizes -- an X-ray diffraction image of a DNA molecule; the first tuberculosis sanatorium. They are the everyday and the extraordinary -- a thermometer; a thought-controlled prosthetic limb. They are of society and of controversy -- cigarette package health warnings; Sigmund Freud's couch. All have a fascinating and entertaining story to tell about medicine as it unfolded over millennia. A History of Medicine in 50 Objects is an essential choice for general and specialty collections. Like the other titles in The History of... series, it is an exceptional selection for reluctant readers.