the greatest benefit to mankind by roy porter

In sum, his key players spend almost as much energy protecting their own interests as they do putting their weight behind farsighted reform.

True, there is a continuity of benevolence in his story, but there is equally a continuity of amorality and benighted collusion. Arriving at the present day, it is hard to unpick Porter’s strands of medicine, state, and society. Sometimes medical “advances” helped the medical profession, sometimes they helped the state (healthier armies, for example), and sometimes they helped the sick. While he tells us enough about a few of the innovators (especially Virchow) to whet our appetites, biographical material is sparse his mission is to show the consequences of discovery, to determine when and how it led to real change. Surveying developments since the Enlightenment, Porter gains momentum. (He wryly notes that a history written from the patient’s point of view would look rather different.) As he puts it, “I have tried to understand the medical systems I discuss rather than passing judgement on them.” At the same time, he admits his is a “winner’s history,” concentrating on developments that have contributed most to the current biomedical beast that holds sway. He is keen to avoid the pitfalls of his project: the “enormous condescension of posterity,” the temptation to dismiss pre-scientific medical traditions. Read as a narrative rather than reference, his book provides a powerful overview.

Was I foolish to expect such insight from a telescoping of over 3000 years into less than a thousand pages? No, because Porter pulls it off.

I might even get a glimpse of what motivated the heroes and the villains. I would find out what they did before the antibiotic revolution, and how they got away with bleeding everyone for hundreds of years. I would find out how medicine got so big, and how doctors can look at things that are so small. Here was a wide ranging, up to date survey of medicine’s place in society. Roy Porter’s book gave me the chance to flesh out my paltry analysis. Someone had told me that Pasteur discovered vaccination someone else that it was Turkish folk medicine. I knew that doctors demand autonomy, but that collectively they make a wonderful political football. I had an idea about their professional status, without knowing how that privilege was won and protected. I knew that the medical-industrial complex had become a victim of its own success and that until quite recently doctors could not do much. Before I read this, my knowledge of medical history could be summed up in a few sentences.

The greatest benefit to mankind by roy porter