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The Invention of Surgery
- A History of Modern Medicine: From the Renaissance to the Implant Revolution
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 23 hrs and 4 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Written by an author with plenty of experience holding a scalpel, Dr. David Schneider's in-depth biography is an encompassing history of the practice that has leapt forward over the centuries from the dangerous guesswork of ancient Greek physicians through the world-changing implant revolution of the 20th century.
The Invention of Surgery explains this dramatic progress and highlights the personalities of the discipline's most dynamic historical figures. It links together the lives of the pioneering scientists who first understood what causes disease, how organs become infected or cancerous, and how surgery could powerfully intercede in people's lives, and then shows how the rise of surgery intersected with many of the greatest medical breakthroughs of the last century, including the evolution of medical education, the transformation of the hospital from a place of dying to a habitation of healing, the development of antibiotics, and the rise of transistors and polymer science. And as Schneider argues, surgery has not finished transforming; new technologies are constantly reinventing both the practice of surgery and the nature of the objects we are permanently implanting in our bodies. Schneider considers these latest developments, asking "What's next?", and analyzing how our conception of surgery has changed alongside our evolving ideas of medicine, technology, and our bodies.
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What listeners say about The Invention of Surgery
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 2020-04-14
Very long and very good
It’s amazing that a single book could cover medical history and social history in such imaginatively expressed detail.
This isn’t a just history book about the misdirection of past social and medical practices as it is a tour de force of man’s ingenious invention and persistence.
I
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- Emily Holmes
- 2022-12-17
Good until the end
This book is excellent until that last 2 hours or so. At that point it gets a bit creepy and has big eugenics vibes… the author doesn’t seem to have a good grasp of medical inequalities when predicting the future of medicine and suggesting that experimental elective procedures will become the norm. I was really disappointed because I enjoyed the book up to that point and then the author kind of went off the deep end
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