'Roy Porter, a historian of formidable range, turns to urban history in this marvellously lucid, informative and passionate book...Porter's facts are always at the service of the narrative, which has a finely maintained momentum, balancing statistics with the words of historians, diarists and noveli[...]

'As an introduction to early modern thinking and the impact of past ideas on present lives, this book can find few equals and no superiors. Porter is a witty, humane writer with an extraordinary vocabulary and a sparkling sense of fun. Whether he is quoting from obscure medical texts or analysing sc[...]

Mankind's battle to stay alive is the greatest of all subjects. This brief, witty and unusual book by Britain's greatest medical historian compresses into a tiny span a lifetime spent thinking about millennia of human ingenuity in the quest to cheat death. Each chapter sums up one of these battlefie[...]

This work explores what we really mean by "madness", covering an enormous range of topics from witches to creative geniuses, electric shock therapy to sexual deviancy, psychoanalysis to prozac.[...]

Hailed as "a remarkable achievement" (Boston Sunday Globe) and as "a triumph: simultaneously entertaining and instructive, witty and thought-provoking . . . a splendid and thoroughly engrossing book" (Los Angeles Times), Roy Porter's charting of the history of medicine affords us an opportunity as n[...]

A professor of social history shares a lifetime of insights into the metaphysics of the body by retracing the emergence of a renaissance understanding of the body and the fading notion of a soul contained within it. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.[...]

Against the backdrop of an unprecedented concern for health today, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine not only surveys the rise of medicine in the West from earliest times to the present day, but also glimpses into the future. It is written by a team of experts co-ordinated by one of the [...]

The Enlightenment has often been written about as a sequence of disembodied 'great ideas'. The aim of this book is to put the beliefs of the Enlightenment firmly into their social context, by revealing the national soils in which they were rooted and the specific purposes for which they were used. I[...]

From Anne Rice's best-selling novels to our recurrent interest in vampires and the occult, the Gothic has an unyielding hold on our imagination. But what exactly does "Gothic" mean? How does it differ from "terror" or "horror," and where do its parameters lie? Through a wide and eclectic range of br[...]

The rise of the asylum constitutes one of the most profound, and controversial, events in the history of medicine. Academics around the world have begun to direct their attention to the origins of the confinement of those deemed 'insane', exploring patient records in an attempt to understand the ris[...]

The Cambridge History of Medicine, first published in 2006, surveys the rise of medicine in the West from classical times to the present. Covering both the social and scientific history of medicine, this volume traces the chronology of key developments and events, while at the same time engaging wit[...]