Essays in the History of Therapeutics

Book excerpt: Therapeutics has been central to the medical enterprise in all times and all places, but a subject that is all too often neglected by historians. The essays in this volume follow a range in chronology from antiquity to the 1980s and in geography from the Mediterranean Basin to the New World. They touch on such matters as diet and drugs, magic and surgery, orthodox and unorthodox approaches. What they share is an attempt to get beyond the easy dismissal of almost all therapeutics before the twentieth century as meaningless and harmful and to examine concrete dimensions of the therapeutic encounter in its social, professional, religious and scientific reverberations.