The Second Half of Blood and Guts

Finished Blood and Guts the other day. Chapters four through eight covered therapies, surgeries, hosptitals, and modern medicine.
For ages the solution for most ills were herbal remedies. Some folk medicine led to greater things. Willow bark for fever began the quest for aspirin, and moldy bread for cuts laid the groundwork in the search for antibiotics. Therapy did not benefit from the laboratory immediately. It was not until 1905 that lab work isolated the parasite responsible for syphilis, but the cure produced two years later due to this research showed the promise that science had for medicine.
One of the most important achievements in medicine was the identification (1928) and production (1940) of penicillin. Not only did this make therapy for many bacterial diseases effective, it also made surgery a procedure that was not excessively life threatening. Of course, surgery was performed before then. Surgery lacked popularity and prestige because it was painful and it very often was deadly. This led to a market where surgeons were valued for their expertise and especially their speed. Without anasthetics or antibiotics, surgeons were not capable of operating for much and were not held in very high esteem. Now that surgery is relatively safe and painless, it's interesting to see how different a role surgeons play in the medical world.
The progress of the surgeon (and antibiotics) follows along the same lines as the progress of the hospital. Hospitals were, for a long time, places of care rather than places of cure. The sick and dying poor along with anyone else looked to a hospital for comfort, but not healing. Advances in therapy, in surgery, and in other forms of medical technology gave physicians the power to truly heal, but at a cost that only a hospital could afford. Hospitals became medicine powerhouses, and today they take up a very large portion of health care costs in the world.
One of the most startling paradoxes of modern medicine is that the doctor-patient relationship has all but faded in an age where the doctor has an unprecedented ability to truly heal. In ages past where a doctor could often do nothing, bonds between a doctor and the families he cared for were quite strong. Perhaps physicians at that time felt it was the least they could offer.
This was a very interesting book and I recommend it to anyone who is looking into the field of medicine for a career. Just look for Blood & Guts by Roy Porter.

Reading up on Medicine's History

Blood and Guts has been very interesting so far. The first chapter is a brief history of disease in humanity, the second chapter a history of healers (doctors). I thought the history of doctors was especially interesting, because the devotion to expertise and professionalism in the Hippocratic oath is so familiar to our idea of doctors now. Even the inaccuracies of classic physiology (the four humors, etc.) reflect the need to have an expert put complex concepts into terms that a layperson can understand, which is part of what the very word doctor means. To me, this makes the field of medicine feel at once both old and new in a very special and exciting way.
The third chapter covers advances in anatomy. What was most interesting about this chapter was that discovering a body part seemed much easier than figuring out what it did. That is, even organs whose form one might think would strongly suggest function were not seen for what they were.
The fourth chapter, on the laboratory, felt more like the medical history I was expecting to read. It went through the development of the laboratory and the physicians gradual entry into the lab. Of special interest to me was Koch's Postulate on how to determine if an organism was responsible for a disease.
More on Blood and Guts later!