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Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and our Difficulty Swallowing It

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15.99 JOD

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Description

Doctors and patients alike trust the medical profession and its therapeutic powers; yet this trust has often been misplaced. Whether prescribing opium or thalidomide, aspirin or antidepressants, doctors have persistently failed to test their favourite ideas – often with catastrophic results. From revolutionary America to Nazi Germany and modern big-pharmaceuticals, this is the unexpected story of just how bad medicine has been, and of its remarkably recent effort to improve. It is the history of well-meaning doctors misled by intuition, of the startling human cost of their mistakes and of the exceptional individuals who have helped make things better. Alarming and optimistic, Taking the Medicine is essential reading for anyone interested in how and why to trust the pills they swallow.

Additional information

Weight 0.234 kg
Dimensions 2 × 12.9 × 19.8 cm
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Format

Paperback
Language

Pages

336
Publisher

Year Published

2010-1-7
Imprint

Publication City/Country

London, United Kingdom
ISBN 10

1845951506
About The Author

Druin Burch works as a hospital doctor in Oxford, and is the author of Digging up the Dead, a biography of the Victorian surgeon Astley Paston Cooper.
Review Quote

A fascinating history of the development of clinical trials and the thinking behind them
Other text

For all the wizardry of modern medicine, with its bionic limbs and targeted drugs, doctors still cannot assume they have all the answers. This book offers a valuable inoculation against complacency

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