Historia de la medicina

whole book reset in a modem style. Each word has a guide to pronunciation, a succinct definition, and an explanation of its derivation. Historical material is limited to eponymous surnames, with a two-or three-word biographical note and, for reasons that are not clear, only the date of birth. Historians will, therefore, wish to use other source-books for this type of information. Nevertheless , the Dictionary will be of inestimable value to them, especially to those who lack medical training. Without doubt it will continue to be one of the most outstanding dictionaries of medical terms in the world. P. Lain Entralgo is one of the elder statesmen of the history of medicine. A gifted scholar and a sensitive writer, he is known to English readers through translations of his works, Doctor andpatient and Mind and body. The present book is his comprehensive vision of the history of medicine and his statement of how he believes it to have shaped society and historical change, and, more pointedly, how that history demonstrates in the concrete a particular vision of human nature. History for Lain Entralgo is indeed philosophy teaching by example. Refusing allegiance to any formal ideology, he takes an idiosyncratic, eclectic and non-teleological view of history which he sees primarily as a series of active creations on the part of human beings "more or less conditioned" by the intellectual, social, and economic boundaries of the age. He appeals in this context to the work of Thomas Kuhn to explain the coherence and revolutions of medical thought. Though he believes medical practice to have certain universal features, he clearly holds that there was a profound caesura in medical life in sixth-century Greece. Primitive medicine along with healing in the ancient civilizations gets short but scholarly shrift, his rather slighting view of magical medicine sits oddly with his obvious grasp of the material. There is an extended analysis of Greek medicine, divided into theory and practice and pervaded by a deep respect for the Hippocratic authors. This, of course, is fully consonant with Lain Entralgo's Platonic vision of the doctor-patient relationship which he sees as contaminated in various ways by the failures of men and society, least so among the Greeks. Each subsequent period receives similar treatment commencing with a neat pr6cis of the dominant philosophy of the age, followed by an analysis first of the theory and then of the practice of …