THE object of this fascinating work, the author of which is professor of history at Duke University (Carolina), is to portray certain major aspects of medical development against a background of intellectual and social history in general from the commencement of the seventeenth century down to tho present time. In the eighteenth century it is shown that physic at first did not keep pace with physics, and it was not until the latter part of this century and the beginning of the nineteenth that medicine began to make further progress. An important stop in advance was the successful attempt to correlate clinical and post-mortem observations, in which Boerhaave, Haller and most of all Morgagni were pioneers. The second half of the eighteenth century was notable for contributions made to public health, such as the establishment of hospitals and dispensaries, child welfare, the control of drunkenness, work on naval and military hygiene, vaccination and other sanitary reforms.

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Publication history

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1038/140386b0

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