Afascinating and highly accessible look at the surprising role serendipity has played in some of the most important medical discoveries in the twentieth...

Argues that the pace of medical discoveries has slowed in the last twenty-five years due to excessive emphasis on the social and political aspects of health care, and to controversies caused by ethical issues.

The relation of the progress of medical science to the social history of humanity. Starting with the seventeenth century, the author analyzes the defeats as well as the triumphs that medicine has gone through to reach its present usefulness.

The End of Modern Medicine chronicles the work of a small, influential band of medical theorists and clinicians who over the past decade have sought to redress the physical fundamentalism of the biomedical model that shaped their professional training. Laurence Foss challenges the prevailing medical model whereby mind and body are essentially separated, and charts a new "psychobiological" course. Asking fresh questions, raising new possibilities, probing long-established preconceptions, Foss presents a radically reconfigured medical model. This model accounts for the full range of findings in the experimental literature, most notably those surfacing over the past quarter century in psychophysiological studies which show a correlation between psychosocial variables and disease susceptibility that are in line with what more basic sciences tell us about the behavior of material systems and the nature of scientific explanation. Foss also critically analyzes the regulative ideals of today's medical research community and puts modern science itself, from which these ideals derive, under a microscope.

Science, technology, and medicine all contributed to the emerging modern Japanese empire and conditioned key elements of post-war development. As the only emerging non-Western country that was a colonial power in its own right, Japan utilized these fields not only to define itself as racially different from other Asian countries and thus justify its imperialist activities, but also to position itself within the civilized and enlightened world with the advantages of modern science, technologies, and medicine. This book explores the ways in which scientists, engineers and physicians worked directly and indirectly to support the creation of a new Japanese empire, focussing on the eve of World War I and linking their efforts to later post-war developments. By claiming status as a modern, internationally-engaged country, the Japanese government was faced with having to control pathogens that might otherwise not have threatened the nation. Through the use of traditional and innovative techniques, this volume shows how the government was able to fulfil the state’s responsibility to protect society to varying degrees. Chapter 14 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.