the history of modern medicine

[Hygro]

Anyone have any good leads on this? I'm interested in how thought has been changing in medicine over the last couple of centuries. Doctors are an interesting bunch. As a rule they aren't very scientific, but they think they are. The area in which doctors operate and medical science operates is depressingly divorced on the whole. But this has been changing, I hope anyway, and I'd love to know what that story is.

 

[Kyriakos]

Maybe start with Galen? He seems to have been the foundation of early modern medicine and is still cited afaik.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen

 

[Hygro]

Perhaps a good place to start as any but anything before the scientific method leeches is possibly too dated. but perhaps not. Thanks!

 

[Plotinus]

Early modern medicine begins with Paracelsus, who devoted much of his career to overthrowing Galen.

 

[Verbose]

Try James Le Fanu's "The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine". It's a pretty good read.
http://books.google.se/books?id=Txx...a=X&ei=2w1yUriqHMbR4QS5toCIAQ&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA

The anthology "Companion to the History of Medicine in the Twentieth Century" is pretty wiedely used as a textbook. Less of a good read — more scholarly.
http://books.google.se/books/about/..._Twentieth_C.html?id=K4KGLs2LoAwC&redir_esc=y

Edit:
One of the currently most used (best) introductions to the history of medicine in William Bynum's "A History of Medicine: A Very Short Introduction", which is pretty good in the short format:
http://books.google.se/books?id=23n...age&q=bynum short history of medicine&f=false

You wan't recent and updated weighty tome, there's poor Roy Porter's (may he rest in peace) "The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity":
http://books.google.se/books?id=igG...a=X&ei=FQ9yUvzoDeTj4QSU3YHIBw&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA

If you want to get into the modern hard biomedical research stuff, you could try Peter Keating and Antonio Cambrosio's "Biomedical Platforms: Realigning the Normal and the Pathological in Late-Twentieth-Century Medicine":
http://books.google.se/books?id=E2w...EwAA#v=onepage&q=biomedical platforms&f=false

Necessary classic for the deal with "the normal and the pathological" as crucial concepts in the history of modern medicine (from ca 1850) is Georges Canghuilem's "The Normal and the Pathological":
http://books.google.se/books?id=E2w...EwAA#v=onepage&q=biomedical platforms&f=false

From there a logical step is into specific history of melocular biology, biochemistry etc., but then the "medical" side to things start to go seriously blurry at the edges.

 

[Verbose]

Early modern medicine begins with Paracelsus, who devoted much of his career to overthrowing Galen.

By most counts modern (bio)medicine is now taken to start around 1850. It's when experimental laboratory practices start to really kick-in in medical research (physiology, medicial chemistry, bacteriology etc.).

 

[Hygro]

Thanks, Verbose! I hope I have more questions in the future How did you get into the topic?

 

[cybrxkhan]

By most counts modern (bio)medicine is now taken to start around 1850. It's when experimental laboratory practices start to really kick-in in medical research (physiology, medicial chemistry, bacteriology etc.).

Yeah, I'd agree the modern medicine as we knew it really started in the 1800s. In the 1700s in Europe things were a lot messier and and there was still a lot of reliance on outdated ideas such as Galen's.