Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine's Beautiful Idea, and our Difficulty Swallowing It

Description

Druin Burch's controversial argument is that, for most of human history, medicine has been a catastrophe. Over the last two thousand years doctors have killed patients far more often than they saved them, and patients have colluded because they trusted them. This book is about how little and how much has changed. It is about the medical drugs of modern Europe and America, and ways we have learnt to understand them. For years patients have placed their trust in doctors and the drugs they prescribe. Yet as Druin Burch's thought-provoking history of medicine demonstrates our trust has often been misplaced. Only with the development of antibiotics after the Second World War did doctors begin to cure more than they killed but even in this supposedly advanced age patients feel victim to tragedies such as the Thalidomide scandal. Burch argues that the real heroes of medicine are the men and women who demonstrated the vital importance of controlled testing over the 'intuition' of doctors and encourages us to ask more questions about the new breed of wonder drugs, to question our own doctors and to press governments against handing control of our medicines, and our lives, to global drug companies. His book is both alarming and optimistic, and is essential reading.

Druin Burch works as a hospital doctor in Oxford, and is the author of DIGGING UP THE DEAD, a biography of the Victorian surgeon Astley Paston Cooper.

"A fascinating history of the development of clinical trials and the thinking behind them" Literary Review "For all the wizardry of modern medicine, with its bionic limbs and targeted drugs, doctors still cannot assume they have all the answers. This book offers a valuable inoculation against complacency" New Scientist "Taking The Medicine is both an assault on the myths of the infallible doctor and a history of pharmacology - the search for the one, true treatment... Burch makes a compelling case" Sunday Telegraph "Each chapter is a self-contained pleasure to read, like mini-fables on the perils of medicine" Sunday Times "Burch approaches his task with vigour and pace, exploring the therapeutic failures of doctors over the ages...there is much of interest as the story unfolds" Irish Times