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Bad Medicine : Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates [Kindle Edition]

David Wootton (Author)

4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews) |

Digital List Price:	�9.43 What's this?
Print List Price:	�11.99
Kindle Price:	�7.54 includes VAT* & free wireless delivery via *Amazon Whispernet*
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Length: 320 pages
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Review

A sad but fascinating story of centuries of missed opportunities, unnecessary suffering and misplaced faith in outlandish remedies. (Nick Rennison, Sunday Times Culture )

The historical catastrophe of medicine has never been so excitingly and stirringly told. (Druin Birch, Times Literary Supplement )

David Wotton [creates] a genuinely thrilling adventure out of the abysmal failings of doctors over the past 2000 years. (Druin Birch, Times Literary Supplement )

A very stimulating and thought-provoking book. (Theodore Dalrymple, Sunday Telegraph )

Ought to be required reading for every first year medical student. (British Medical Journal )

lucid, elegantly written and pleasingly slim book (Will Cohu, Sunday Telegraph )

Daily Telegraph, 29 July 2006

a 'lucid, elegantly written and pleasingly slim book'

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Product details

Format: Kindle Edition
File Size: 2106 KB
Print Length: 320 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (22 Jun 2006)
Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.� r.l.
Language English
ASIN: B000SFDAOU
Text-to-Speech: Enabled

Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #93,843 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

A good read 4 July 2008

By Ibrahim Ali

Format:Paperback

A history of medicine with a difference. This book tells more of the failures than of the triumphs and it is all the more richer for that. Medicine should have progressed faster than it did but to blame doctors entirely is not quite giving the whole picture. Similarly there some things that Wooton says that seem wrong in their entirety and putting the start date of medicine in the late eighteen hundred is a little disingenuous and ignores some of the early pioneers. Wooton's dismissal of the early medical profession is a little too arbitrary and the book could have used some better scholarship in backing the arguments it makes. Similarly ignoring economics and politics is also perhaps a little foolhardy especially when debating the dangers of smoking. Wooton manages to have this debate without mentioning Big Tobacco and their lobbies. Nevertheless this is an interesting social history of medicine and one that deserves to be read by all.

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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful

Doctor bashing - not on your life 24 Oct 2006

By S. Harding

Format:Hardcover

This is a well written and thought provoking book. It is supported by a website that is insightful and allows further investigation into some of the aspects raised within the book.

It is not a bash at doctors, but does lay out the history and progression of medicine in a new and fresh way. When I was reading it I spent time laughing and time feeling quite repulsed by some of the things that we have done in the name of medicine.

All I can say is READ it!

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

Exhilarating & refreshing 31 Jan 2012

By WillDavies

Format:Paperback

What makes a history readable? Normally for me it's being structured around a biography. Here it's just the vivid narrative. Wootton tells the surprising story of doctors, as his subtitle says, doing more harm than good. It's pithy, persuasive and superbly readable. I couldn't get my nose out of the pages, and it's one of the few books (even amongst those I've enjoyed greatly) that have stayed very much in my mind ever since. Thoroughly recommended, and no particular knowledge or interest is required from the reader - just a willingness to be absorbed in a terrific historical story.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

bad medicine

It is good in that he touches on subject areas, many people would probably not be familiar with, but I believe he lacks depth of research and has rather sensationalised certain... Read more

Published on 8 Mar 2010 by Mrs. A. L. Habermacher

Popular Highlights

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the three paradoxes of progressineffectual progress, immoral progress, progress postponedare still at work. &quote;

Highlighted by 6 Kindle users

The use of anaesthetics was pioneered not by surgeons but by humble dentists, not in London, or Paris, or Berlin, the centres of medical research, but first in Rochester, NY, and then in Boston. One of the first practitioners of painless dentistry, Horace Wells, was driven to suicide by the hostility of the medical profession. When anaesthesia was first employed in Europe, in London in 1846, it was called a Yankee dodge. &quote;

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Medicine defined itself as a science by transferring responsibility for failure, firmly and remorselessly, from doctor to patient. &quote;

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