Fine historian needs a finer memorialBlood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine by Roy Porter. W. W. Norton & Company, 2003. US$21.95. (hardback, 199 pp.)
ISBN 0393037622
Christopher Lawrence
The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London, 24 Eversholt Road, London, UK NW1 1AB
I hope this was not Roy Porter’s lastbook. It would be a good guess that thereare a few more in the pipeline. RoyPorter was Professor of Social History ofMedicine at the Wellcome Trust Centrefor the History of Medicine, UniversityCollege, London. Sadly he died aged 56in March 2002. By general agreement,he was one of the most talented his-
torians of his generation. Beginning at Cambridge as astudent of the history of geology, he moved to Londonand turned his hand to the history of psychiatry, beforeexploring medicine’s past more generally. Roy’s loveremained the Enlightenment and it was this area thathis most important contributions to scholarship lay. Hewas a prolific author and famously we used to joke abouthim that he could write faster than we could read. Not onlywas his bibliography immense, but he was also a tirelesscontributor to radio, television and the lecture circuit.Prolixity sometimes has its price and in Roy’s case it wassometimes the production of pot-boilers that were under-researched and of little scholarly value. There is nothingwrong with the latter of course, but sometimes Roy’scommitment to bringing history to the general publicwas based on the sacrifice of even simple things suchas accuracy.
Unfortunately this is one such production. It is, as itssubtitle tells us, ‘A Short History of Medicine’, a field inwhich competition is stiff these days (as is evident fromthe bibliography). Porter’s book is a gallop through themedical past rarely enlightened by the sorts of penetratinginsights and asides of which he was capable. Its virtue isthat it does not adopt a straight-forward chronologicalstructure (now a very tired approach). Rather, Porter hasorganized his book by subject, such as ‘Disease’, ‘Doctors’,and ‘The Laboratory’. More fashionable topics are alsopresent, notably ‘The Body’, but ‘Disease’ is one of the bestchapters. Here Porter takes a long-term and global view ofhumankind and the afflictions to which it was, and is, heir.The mass killers from Neolithic diseases originating in thenewly domesticated animals to AIDS are taken in. This
chapter would be invaluable to a student wanting the bigpicture of the importance of pathology in determiningculture. ‘Doctors’, which follows, is less well done. This isstrange because Porter was at his strongest in socialhistory and had been at the fore of bringing the so-calledpatient’s point of view to the historian’s attention. Itcontains some lax errors for so erudite a scholar. TheHippocratic Corpus is represented in this chapter as boundtogether by the classic four humour theory. But this theoryonly appears in one of the books of that multi-volume work.Anatomical errors creep into ‘The Body’ chapter. Theancients did not think the heart had three ventricles, butthree chambers. Rather tired modernizing accounts aregiven of 17th-century microscopists. How can it be saidthat Leeuwenhoek discovered microorganisms when hedidn’t have the faintest clue about bacteriology? ThomasBeddoes did not discover nitrous oxide (Joseph Priestleydid) although he certainly made use of it. ‘The Laboratory’too contains curious mistakes and it is only when Portergets away from science and back to social history in‘Therapies’ that his strengths reappear. However, thechapter ‘Surgery’ is not really his forte. There is aninteresting account of the history of anaesthesia, theintroduction of which is attributed to a William E. Clarke(who I have never heard of) in America in 1842. There isno mention the American dentist, William Morton (and thekey date of 1846), usually thought of as a central figurein this development. Porter also revels too much in theputative barbarity of early surgery contrasting it in wordsand pictures with the modern aseptic order. However, hedoes raise some of the ethical questions that surroundcurrent practice. This is quite well done for medicine ingeneral in the final chapter where the student is provokedto think historically about medical issues. With a littlemore care and attention to detail this book could have beena most valuable teaching aid, but if you are not familiarwith the subject, beware!
0160-9327/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2004.01.007
Corresponding author: Christopher Lawrence ([email protected]).
Update Endeavour Vol.28 No.2 June 200452
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