Wendy Moore’s The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery is fascinating but not for the squeamish. The key figure is John Hunter, an 18th-century anatomist and revolutionary surgeon of volatile temperament, with a hunger for knowledge that drove him to rob thousands of graves, record the tastes of corpses’ bodily […]
Why were the Greeks the first to put medicine on a scientific footing?
Medical politics in ancient Greece Read More »
“The greatest obstacle to discovery,” argues Barry Marshall, “is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.” Marshall is the co-discoverer of Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium that causes stomach ulcers, for which he won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine. But his hypothesis initially met with great resistance from the medical establishment, which was strongly committed
Barry Marshall, ulcers, and resistance to discovery Read More »
David Hume topped this 2009 PhilPapers survey of most influential and admired philosophers (scroll down to bottom of the page to “Non-living philosophers most identified with”). Aristotle came in second and Kant third. I’ve been thinking much about Nietzsche and Heidegger recently: eleventh and eighteenth, respectively. Overall, the list was still dominated by thinkers in
David Hume’s current influence Read More »
A striking quotation from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilization have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic
Kuhn on the Greeks and scientific culture Read More »
Syphilis is thought to have been brought back from America by Christopher Columbus’s fellow travelers. In Europe, it first manifested in Naples and so came to be called “the disease of Naples,” though most Italians came to call it the “French Pox.” As it made its way across Europe and then Asia, syphilis acquired a
Syphilis and friendly ethnic relations Read More »
Medieval medical know-how: “John of Gaddesden (1280-1349), physician to Edward II and compiler of the encyclopaedic Rosa anglica medicinae [The English Rose of Medicine], recommended reciting the gospel over an epileptic patient while bedecking him with peony and chrysanthemum amulets or the hair of a white dog” (From Roy Porter’s excellent The Greatest Benefit to
Curing epilepsy — peonies, the gospel, and hair of the dog Read More »
A fun anecdote from the history of medicine. (Fun in hindsight, though not necessarily fun for those who lived through the medical history.) The late-medieval Iatrochemists believed that progress could be made by uniting medicine with alchemy. Their intellectual leader was Paracelsus (1493-1541), a Swiss physician whose goal was to reform medical chemistry by rejecting
Iatrochemists: why iron salts cure anemia Read More »