The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine: Revised Edition

Resumen del libro

In the years following World War II, medicine won major battles against smallpox, diphtheria, and polio. In the same period it also produced treatments to control the progress of Parkinson's, rheumatoid arthritis, and schizophrenia. It made realities of open-heart surgery, organ transplants, test-tube babies. Unquestionably, the medical accomplishments of the postwar years stand at the forefront of human endeavor, yet progress in recent decades has slowed nearly to a halt. In this judicious examination of medicine in our times, which has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, medical doctor and columnist James Le Fanu both surveys the glories of medicine in the postwar years and analyzes the factors that for the past twenty-five years have increasingly widened the gulf between achievement and advancement: the social theories of medicine, ethical issues, and political debates over health care that have hobbled the development of vaccines and discovery of new "miracle" cures. While fully demonstrating the extraordinary progress effected by medical research in the latter half of the twentieth century, Le Fanu also identifies the perils that confront medicine in the twenty-first. 16 pages of black-and-white photographs add to what the Los Angeles Times cited as "a sobering, contrarian challenge" to the "nostrum of medicine as a never-ending font of 'miracle cures'." "[From] a respected science writer ... important information that ... has been overlooked or ignored by many physicians."-New Republic "Provocative and engrossing and informative."-Houston Chronicle "Marvelously written, meticulously researched ... one of the most thought-provoking and important works to appear in recent years."-Choice

In the years following World War II, medicine not only won major battles against smallpox, diphtheria, and polio but also produced treatments to control Parkinson's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and schizophrenia. It made realities, too, of open-heart surgery, organ transplants, and test-tube babies. Yet progress in recent decades has slowed nearly to a halt. Doctors are not professionally fulfilled, health care costs are exponentially increasing, and the public is growing more neurotic about its health.

In his Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning work, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, doctor and historian of science and medicine James Le Fanu offers a judicious examination of the medical community's postwar achievements and outlines the factors that have stalled further advancement. While fully demonstrating the extraordinary progress effected by medical research in the latter half of the twentieth century, this provocative and now newly revised edition also clearly identifies the challenges that medicine faces in the twenty-first.

Contributors
James Le Fanu, M.D., is a medical columnist for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph as well as a writer for the Times, the Spectator, and GQ.