by Druin Burch - £10.99 Vintage (2010)
paperback
ISBN 13: 9781845951504 | ISBN 10: 1845951506
For years patients have placed their trust in doctors and the drugs they prescribe. Yet as Druin Burch’s thought-provoking history of medicine demonstrates our trust has often been misplaced. Only with the development of antibiotics after the Second World War did doctors begin to cure more than they killed but even in this supposedly advanced age patients feel victim to tragedies such as the Thalidomide scandal.
Burch argues that the real heroes of medicine are the men and women who demonstrated the vital importance of controlled testing over the ‘intuition’ of doctors and encourages us to ask more questions about the new breed of wonder drugs, to question our own doctors and to press governments against handing control of our medicines, and our lives, to global drug companies. His book is both alarming and optimistic, and is essential reading.
(Price & availability last checked: November 2018)
In booklists: Politics of Health,
In categories: History & Biography, Health & Wellbeing,
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