Amazon cover image
Image from Amazon.com
Image from Google Jackets
Image from OpenLibrary

Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine's Beautiful Idea, and Our Difficulty Swallowing It

By: Material type: TextTextPublication details: London Vintage 2010Description: 330 pages ; 24 cmISBN:
  • 9781845951504
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 615.109 BUR-T
Summary: Doctors and patients alike trust the medical profession and its therapeutic powers; yet this trust has often been misplaced. Whether prescribing opium or thalidomide, aspirin or antidepressants, doctors have persistently failed to test their favourite ideas - often with catastrophic results. From revolutionary America to Nazi Germany and modern big-pharmaceuticals, this is the unexpected story of just how bad medicine has been, and of its remarkably recent effort to improve. It is the history of well-meaning doctors misled by intuition, of the startling human cost of their mistakes and of the exceptional individuals who have helped make things better. Alarming and optimistic, Taking the Medicine is essential reading for anyone interested in how and why to trust the pills they swallow.
Tags from this library: No tags from this library for this title. Log in to add tags.
Holdings
Item type Current library Home library Call number Status Date due Barcode
Book Book Dept. of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Processing Center Dept. of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics 615.109 BUR-T (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available DCB1652

Doctors and patients alike trust the medical profession and its therapeutic powers; yet this trust has often been misplaced. Whether prescribing opium or thalidomide, aspirin or antidepressants, doctors have persistently failed to test their favourite ideas - often with catastrophic results. From revolutionary America to Nazi Germany and modern big-pharmaceuticals, this is the unexpected story of just how bad medicine has been, and of its remarkably recent effort to improve. It is the history of well-meaning doctors misled by intuition, of the startling human cost of their mistakes and of the exceptional individuals who have helped make things better. Alarming and optimistic, Taking the Medicine is essential reading for anyone interested in how and why to trust the pills they swallow.

There are no comments on this title.

to post a comment.