Roy Porter
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Description
"Roy Porter explores medicine's evolution against the backdrop of the wider religious, scientific, philosophical, and political beliefs of the culture in which it develops, and he shows how our need to understand where diseases come from and what we can do to control them has -- perhaps above all else -- inspired developments in medicine through the ages. He charts the remarkable rise of modern medical science -- the emergence of specialties such...
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"With its representative government, religious tolerance, precocious industrialization, and pioneering individualism, eighteenth-century Britain was at the cutting edge of political, social, and intellectual innovation. Porter examines the influence of such heroic figures as Bacon, Newton, and Locke in shaping the British Enlightenment, as well as the impact of other English essayists and novelists in popularizing modern thought. He persuasively demonstrates...
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A history of "madness" offers readers a history of mental illness and its treatment. The book reveals radically different perceptions of madness and approaches to its treatment, from antiquity to the present day. The author explores what we really mean by 'madness', covering an enormous range of topics from electric shock therapy to sexual deviancy, witches to creative geniuses, and psychoanalysis to Prozac. The origins of current debates about how...
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This dazzling and yet intimate book is the first modern one-volume history of London from Roman times to the present. An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical age into an important medieval city, a significant Renaissance urban center, and a modern collossus. Roy Porter writes a whole life of this world-renowned place - from the grid streets and fortresses of Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror to the medieval, walled...
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"The Figure of the Healer occupies a central position in the history of humankind. But how have therapeutic practices changed and developed over time, and what sort of role did the healer fulfill in other cultures and in times gone by? The journey from the quasi-religious rituals of the tribal shaman to today's high-tech computer-based diagnostic techniques is a long one. How did the story evolve? This beautifully illustrated book provides the fascinating...
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The Industrial Revolution has been, and continues to be, the focus of massive historiographical as well as historical enquiry. This collection includes reappraisals by Phyllis Deane and by Francois Crouzet of their classic accounts of industrialization in Britain and in France, and more generally broaches the wider issue of 'new approaches' which have been emerging for the understanding of the industrializing process in nations where it came somewhat...
10) Rape
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This collection of essays aims to increase our understanding of rape by subjecting it to scrutiny from many different points of view. The editors bring together divergent and scattered debates about rape without trying to fabricate a consensus.
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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. It brings out the regional divergences of the Enlightenment experience, shaped by different local intellectual and economic priorities. At the same time...
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In the late summer of 1941, as the war in Europe drags on, long-buried secrets begin to surface in the Hampshire village of Winstead, when the body of a young woman--a former conscientious objector - is found shot to death in the church cemetery. The woman's only connection to Winstead seems to be that she lately had joined a group of conscripted workers who are building a prisoner of war camp on an abandoned farm near the village. But Detective Chief...
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"This collection charts the progress of the great ideas of science. Ten or twenty aptly-chosen quotations taken from the writings of a great scientist can genuinely provide a digest of their most important scientific perceptions and findings. Enquire within to find the key passages from Darwin's Origin of Species and Newton's Principia Mathematica, the letters of Michael Faraday, the writings of Galileo, and Watson and Crick's famous paper on 'Molecular...