Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates by David Wootton

I have been reading David Wooton's Bad Medicine in which he expouses the claim that until 1865 Doctors did nothing but harm to their patients.

Very interesting book, although he does overstate it, as Doctors were quite competent at dealing with mechanic problems and there were certainly some remedies which by experience did some good, but he is correct that the humoural theory particularly as combined with astrological ideas did mean that erroneous theory out-trumped experience - so his basic thesis is correct.


Oxbow Books - Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates by David Wootton

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How London is Divided Up

Image
The LDA - London Development Agency divides London up as follows: I have no idea who made these decisions but clearly some are not so obvious. For example, Southwark is in the Central Region but the City is in the Eastern Region given that all the bridges across the Thames in Southwark join up with the City this seems crazy! A report which discusses the issue of dividing up London can be seen here. Central sub-region Camden Islington Kensington & Chelsea Lambeth Southwark Wandsworth Westminster North sub-region Barnet Enfield Haringey Waltham Forest East sub-region Barking & Dagenham Bexley Corporation of London Greenwich Hackney Havering Lewisham Newham Redbridge Tower Hamlets South sub-region Bromley Croydon Kingston Merton Richmond Sutton West sub-region Brent Ealing Harrow Hammersmith and Fulham Hillingdon Hounslow
Read more

Updated Lincoln's Inn Fields Wikipedia page

I quite often revise wikipedia pages if I feel I have a moment. This one I did because the London Archaeologist had an article by Barbora Brederova about an excavation in the Fields, and it gave information not clearly listed on Wikipedia. If you want to read it here it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%27s_Inn_Fields#History I included a reference to the discovery of a fragment of a fudding cup.
Read more

New Web site and Blog

Finally, I have moved myself onto wordpress.org. Slightly afraid of the extra fiddle-faddling capability I now have at my finger tips...... So this blog will slowly fade into the dusk The new blog is here: http://www.chr.org.uk/anddidthosefeet/?page_id=11. Go on have a look.
Read more