Even Immortality

Thomas Laqueur: Medicomania, 29 July 1999

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present 
by Roy Porter.
HarperCollins, 833 pp., £24.99, February 1999, 0 00 637454 9
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... in the kidneys; the bundle of His conducting electrical impulses in the heart; the angle of Louis telling generations of medical students where on the chest to place their stethoscopes. There are scores of named physiological processes – Babinski’s sign, the Pavlovian conditioned reflex, Cheyne-Stokes breathing – and even more ...