Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine

Description

Blood and Guts explores the many ingenious, curious and often gruesome ways in which humankind has fought disease over the ages- from Ayurvedic remedies to antibiotics, from blood-letting to X-rays, from crude amputations to organ transplants. With an extraordinary cast of barber surgeons, quacks, apothecaries, witch-doctors and anatomists, this is an eye-opening, humorous and often terrifying look at our ongoing quest for immortality.

Roy Porter was until his retirement Professor in the Social History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. He last book ENLIGHTENMENT won a 2001 Wolfson Prize. Roy Porter died March 3rd 2002.

'Nobody will be able to put down this short history of medicine... without counting their blessings. Never have I read a book which made me so glad not to have been born before the mid-20th century.' Daily Mail