A new comprehensive book on the history of medicine.

This fascinating story of madness reveals the radically different perceptions of madness and approaches to its treatment, from antiquity to the present day.

Chronicles the history of medicine, including the role of doctors, various attempts at controlling disease, and the progress of hospitals.

In this historical tour de force, Roy Porter takes a critical look at representations of the body in health, disease, and death in Britain from the mid-seventeenth to the twentieth century.

Modern scholarship, however, has shown it was a more complex and ambiguous movement than commonly recognized. This book, now in a fully updated second edition, sympathetically explores the complexities of the Enlightenment.

Porter reveals how the monumental transformation of thinking in Great Britain influenced wider developments elsewhere. of color illustrations.

While acknowledging France at the eve of the Revolution as the root of the modern world, Porter also makes a case for considering Britain's importance in catapulting the world into modernity.

Gout has been seen as a disease afflicting upper-class males of superior wit, genius and creativity.

Roy Porter touches the pulse of his hometown and makes it our own, capturing London's fortunes, people, and imperial glory with vigor and wit. 58 photos.