The Alarming History of Medicine: Amusing Anecdotes from Hippocrates to Heart Transplants

Best known for his novels, particularly Doctor in the House , Gordon here presents unusual insights into medical advances. Although noting that ``Religion is of course a Good Thing, offering the valuable incidentals of saddling assertive man with someone more important than himself . . . it scuppered healing for fifteen centuries.'' That being the case, Gordon's irreverent, witty and rich florilegium of medical milestones is largely confined to the last couple of centuries. He demonstrates that many medical milestones resulted from fallacies, luck or serendipity--citing the role of barbers and warfare in promoting surgery--and that forgotten laboratory bacterial specimens led to a cholera vaccine and the discovery of penicillin. According to Gordon, Darwin, a non-doctor, ``founded genetics knowing nothing about DNA,'' and industrial chemist Pasteur stumbled on the microbes leading to pasteurization and vaccination while investigating adulterated wine and beer. The instructive, entertaining lode of superstitions and facts inludes hilarious suggested origins for the word condom and an apt takeoff on Freud treating a patient. Illustrations. (Jan.)