[HN Gopher] Medical history books
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       Medical history books
        
       Author : Ambolia
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2023-01-23 09:35 UTC (13 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (scottlocklin.wordpress.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (scottlocklin.wordpress.com)
        
       | roofone wrote:
       | I really enjoyed "The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to
       | Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine."
       | 
       | About early surgery and the discovery and adoption of anti-
       | septics.
        
       | msla wrote:
       | > it's still not all that clear if letting a doctor treat you is
       | a better idea than staying home, eating right, exercising and
       | minding your own business.
       | 
       | This is a pleasant fantasy people indulge in, but it is a
       | fantasy: It's the notion that disease, by which I mean serious
       | disease, only happens to people who "deserve it" in some sense,
       | whether by dissipated and profligate lifestyle or having the poor
       | sense to live in a clearly disreputable and dirty neighborhood.
       | That might work in some cases, as when a smoker gets lung cancer,
       | but there are plenty of diseases where the cause is quite beyond
       | anyone's control and, possibly, not known at all. The obvious
       | example is all genetic disorders, such as Type 1 Diabetes, which
       | is invariably fatal untreated but can be managed very
       | successfully with medical help, but there are also cancers of
       | unknown origin, such as the one I had which is now in complete
       | remission due to quite a lot of medical intervention, including
       | CAR T-cell therapy.
       | 
       | So the author of the review has an ignorant, moralistic view of
       | health, one which the books they've read have failed to shift.
       | There is a lesson in there somewhere.
        
       | ggm wrote:
       | The Alarming History of Medicine: Amusing Anecdotes from
       | Hippocrates to Heart Transplants - Richard Gordon (1997) is
       | amusingly light-hearted. The author is more famous for medical
       | fiction.
       | 
       | The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha
       | Mukherjee (2010) is very interesting.
        
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