Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine

Abstract

Ed W F Bynum, Roy Porter Routledge, £150, pp 1806 ISBN 0-415-04771-4 We should not ignore our history, but how can we learn about it when there is so much other pressure on our time? One of the most frustrating things about the history of medicine is the lack of any single overview that does the subject justice. The standard books that usually sit at the dusty end of the library do all the things that the modern historian abhors: they pluck medicine out of its social and historical context as if it had an existence separate from the people who engaged in it. They selectively glorify those aspects of the past that we now approve of even if they were irrelevant in …