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  • Published: 15 January 1995
  • ISBN: 9780679760092
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 544
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

Doctors

The Biography of Medicine




From the author of How We Die, the extraordinary story of the development of modern medicine, told through the lives of the physician-scientists who paved the way.

How does medical science advance? Popular historians would have us believe that a few heroic individuals, possessing superhuman talents, lead an unselfish quest to better the human condition. But as renowned Yale surgeon and medical historian Sherwin B. Nuland shows in this brilliant collection of linked life portraits, the theory bears little resemblance to the truth. Through the centuries, the men and women who have shaped the world of medicine have been not only very human, but also very much the products of their own times and places. Presenting compelling studies of great medical innovators and pioneers, Doctors gives us a fascinating history of modern medicine. Ranging from the legendary Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, to Andreas Vesalius, whose Renaissance masterwork on anatomy offered invaluable new insight into the human body, to Helen Taussig, founder of pediatric cardiology and co-inventor of the original "blue baby" operation, here is a volume filled with the spirit of ideas and the thrill of discovery.

  • Published: 15 January 1995
  • ISBN: 9780679760092
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 544
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

About the author

Sherwin B Nuland

Sherwin Nuland was a well-known surgeon in the US - at the top of his profession. He was the author of The Doctors, which explores the ethics of the medical world, How We Die, a bestseller in America and Britain and The Wisdom of the Body.

Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland drew on more than 35 years in medicine and a childhood buffeted by illness in writing How We Die, an award-winning book that sought to dispel the notion of death with dignity and fuelled a national conversation about end-of-life decisions. He died in March 2014 at his home in Hamden, CT.

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