The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. Roy Porter
personal tradition of bedside medicine long remained popular in the West, as did its equivalents in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine. But in Europe it was supplemented and challenged by the creation of a more ‘scientific’ medicine, grounded, for the first time, upon experimental anatomical and physiological investigation, epitomized from the fifteenth century by the dissection techniques which became central to medical education. Landmarks in this programme include the publication of De humani corporis fabrica (1543) by the Paduan professor, Andreas Vesalius, a momentous anatomical atlas and a work which challenged truths received since Galen; and William Harvey’s De motu cordis (1628) which put physiological inquiry on the map by experiments demonstrating the circulation of the blood and the heart’s role as a pump.
Post-Vesalian investigations dramatically advanced knowledge of the structures and functions of the living organism. Further inquiries brought the unravelling of the lymphatic system and the lacteals, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries yielded a finer grasp of the nervous system and the operations of the brain. With the aid of microscopes and the laboratory, nineteenth-century investigators explored the nature of body tissue and pioneered cell biology; pathological anatomy came of age. Parallel developments in organic chemistry led to an understanding of respiration, nutrition, the digestive system and deficiency diseases, and founded such specialities as endocrinology. The twentieth century became the age of genetics and molecular biology.
Nineteenth-century medical science made spectacular leaps forward in the understanding of infectious diseases. For many centuries, rival epidemiological theories had attributed fevers to miasmas (poisons in the air, exuded from rotting animal and vegetable material, the soil, and standing water) or to contagion (person-to-person contact). From the 1860s, the rise of bacteriology, associated especially with Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany, established the role of pathogenie micro-organisms. Almost for the first time in medicine, bacteriology led directly to dramatic new cures.
In the short run, the anatomically based scientific medicine which emerged from Renaissance universities and the Scientific Revolution contributed more to knowledge than to health. Drugs from both the Old and New Worlds, notably opium and Peruvian bark (quinine) became more widely available, and mineral and metal-based pharmaceutical preparations enjoyed a great if dubious vogue (e.g., mercury for syphilis). But the true pharmacological revolution began with the introduction of sulfa drugs and antibiotics in the twentieth century, and surgical success was limited before the introduction of anaesthetics and antiseptic operating-room conditions in the mid nineteenth century. Biomedical understanding long outstripped breakthroughs in curative medicine, and the retreat of the great lethal diseases (diphtheria, typhoid, tuberculosis and so forth) was due, in the first instance, more to urban improvements, superior nutrition and public health than to curative medicine. The one early and striking instance of the conquest of disease – the introduction first of smallpox inoculation and then of vaccination – came not through ‘science’ but through embracing popular medical folklore.
From the Middle Ages, medical practitioners organized themselves professionally in a pyramid with physicians at the top and surgeons and apothecaries nearer the base, and with other healers marginalized or vilified as quacks. Practitioners’ guilds, corporations and colleges received royal approval, and medicine was gradually incorporated into the public domain, particularly in German-speaking Europe where the notion of ‘medical police’ (health regulation and preventive public health) gained official backing in the eighteenth century. The state inevitably played the leading role in the growth of military and naval medicine, and later in tropical medicine. The hospital sphere, however, long remained largely the Church’s responsibility, especially in Roman Catholic parts of Europe. Gradually the state took responsibility for the health of emergent industrial society, through public health regulation and custody of the insane in the nineteenth century, and later through national insurance and national health schemes. These latter developments met fierce opposition from a medical profession seeking to preserve its autonomy against encroaching state bureaucracies.
The latter half of the twentieth century has witnessed the continued phenomenal progress of capital-intensive and specialized scientific medicine: transplant surgery and biotechnology have captured the public imagination. Alongside, major chronic and psychosomatic disorders persist and worsen – jocularly expressed as the ‘doing better but feeling worse’ syndrome – and the basic health of the developing world is deteriorating. This situation exemplifies and perpetuates a key facet and paradox of the history of medicine: the unresolved disequilibrium between, on the one hand, the remarkable capacities of an increasingly powerful science-based biomedical tradition and, on the other, the wider and unfulfilled health requirements of economically impoverished, colonially vanquished and politically mismanaged societies. Medicine is an enormous achievement, but what it will achieve practically for humanity, and what those who hold the power will allow it to do, remain open questions.
The late E. P. Thompson (1924–1993) warned historians against what he called the enormous condescension of posterity. I have tried to understand the medical systems I discuss rather than passing judgment on them; I have tried to spell them out in as much detail as space has permitted, because engagement with detail is essential if the cognitive power of medicine is to be appreciated.
Eschewing anachronism, judgmentalism and history by hindsight does not mean denying that there are ways in which medical knowledge has progressed. Harvey’s account of the cardiovascular system was more correct than Galen’s; the emergence of endocrinology allowed the development in the 1920s of insulin treatments which saved the lives of diabetics. But one must not assume that diabetes then went away: no cure has been found for that still poorly understood disease, and it is becoming more prevalent as a consequence of western lifestyles. Indeed one could argue that the problem is now worse than when insulin treatment was discovered.
Avoiding condescension equally does not mean one must avoid ‘winners’ history. This book unashamedly gives more space to the Greeks than the Goths, more attention to Hippocrates than to Greek root-gatherers, and stresses strands of development leading from Greek medicine to the biomedicine now in the saddle. I do not think that ‘winners’ should automatically be privileged by historians (I have myself written and advocated writing medical history from the patients’ view), but there is a good reason for bringing the winners to the fore-ground – not because they are ‘best’ or ‘right’ but because they are powerful. One can study winners without siding with them.
Writing this book has not only made me more aware than usual of my own ignorance; it has brought home the collective and largely irremediable ignorance of historians about the medical history of mankind. Perhaps the most celebrated physician ever is Hippocrates yet we know literally nothing about him. Neither do we know anything concrete about most of the medical encounters there have ever been. The historical record is like the night sky: we see a few stars and group them into mythic constellations. But what is chiefly visible is the darkness.
CHAPTER II THE ROOTS OF MEDICINE
PEOPLES AND PLAGUES
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE GOLDEN AGE. The climate was clement, nature freely bestowed her bounty upon mankind, no lethal predators lurked, the lion lay down with the lamb and peace reigned. In that blissful long-lost Arcadia, according to the Greek poet Hesiod writing around 700 BC, life was ‘without evils, hard toil, and grievous disease’. All changed. Thereafter, wrote the poet, ‘thousands of miseries roam among men, the land is full of evils and full is the sea. Of themselves, diseases come upon men, some by day and some by night, and they bring evils to the mortals.’
The Greeks explained the coming of pestilences and other troubles by the fable of Pandora’s box. Something similar is offered by Judaeo-Christianity. Disguised in serpent’s clothing, the Devil seduces Eve into tempting Adam to taste the forbidden fruit. By way of punishment for that primal disobedience, the pair are banished from Eden; Adam’s sons are condemned to labour by the sweat of their brow, while the daughters of Eve must bring forth in pain; and disease and death, unknown in the paradise garden, become the iron law of the post-lapsarian world, thenceforth a vale of tears. As