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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... when discoveries if not cures begin to pile up at an increasing pace. In the age of Vesalius and Harvey, modernity and medicine begin their strange, ambiguously successful, pas de deux, as the body is mapped in ever finer detail, its deepest secrets are brought to light, and its ailments are chronicled, ameliorated and on occasion even conquered. Porter’s ...