A Short History of Medicine

Humans have always become sick, suffered pain and disability, sought care and meaning; designated healers have always done their best with the time-bound intellectual tools at their disposal; one could only see what one was prepared to see. What professors professed was not the same as the everyday practice acted out at bedsides, whether in homes or, more recently, in hospitals. By reminding us of these stubborn realities, Ackerknecht offered a way of thinking about medicine that complicated but did not displace the standard history of Western medicine. It is this inclusive point of view that distinguished this Short History. While foregounding the intellectual and related clinical development of Western medicine, Ackerknecht sought, at the same time, to place it within a larger cultural, historical¿and by implication, moral¿framework.Charles E. Rosenberg, Harvard University, author of Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now

Erwin H. Ackerknecht's A Short History of Medicine is a concise narrative, long appreciated by students in the history of medicine, medical students, historians, and medical professionals as well as all those seeking to understand the history of medicine.

Covering the broad sweep of discoveries from parasitic worms to bacilli and x-rays, and highlighting physicians and scientists from Hippocrates and Galen to Pasteur, Koch, and Roentgen, Ackerknecht narrates Western and Eastern civilization's work at identifying and curing disease. He follows these discoveries from the library to the bedside, hospital, and laboratory, illuminating how basic biological sciences interacted with clinical practice over time. But his story is more than one of laudable scientific and therapeutic achievement. Ackerknecht also points toward the social, ecological, economic, and political conditions that shape the incidence of disease. Improvements in health, Ackerknecht argues, depend on more than laboratory knowledge: they also require that we