Compelling and informative, this overview of medical history traces the development of modern-day medical practices from their roots in the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. 131 black-and-white illustrations. 16 plates.

Popular history of medicine, from medicine-man to doctors.

What would Christianity be like without the soul? While most people would expect the Christian bible to reveal a highly traditional opposition of matter and spirit, the spirit forces of the Old and New Testaments are often surprisingly physical, dynamic, and practical, a matter of energy as much as ethics. The Secret History of the Soul examines the forgotten or suppressed models of body, soul, and human consciousness found in the literature, philosophy and scripture of the ancient and classical worlds. It shows how the spirit forces of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the Old and New Testaments tended to be quantities not entities, and to be closely bound up with the dynamic physical flux of the human body, rather than cleanly abstracted in some absolute immaterial realm. Forces such as menos and thymos, nephesh, pneuma and dynamis not only blurred the line between body and soul, but were potent and transferable, being used, in New Testament culture, to effect magical cures or bestow magical power. Related to this surprising lack of body-soul dualism is a lack of dualistic afterlife in either Homer or Hebrew scripture, where Hades and Sheol are the sole post-mortem destinations. The Secret History of the Soul restores the living strangeness of a spirit world filled with potent energy and practical magic, in cultures which had not yet glimpsed the abstracted soul of later Christianity.

You don't need religion to kill Roe v Wade constitutionally, although some pro-Roe politicians use religion (in reverse) to shield Roe from being killed so. Side A argues that supporting abortion-access contradicts Jesus Christ, the giver of "abundant life". Side B argues that the fetus unquestionably qualifies as a 5th (14th) Amendment person. The two arguments are laid side by side so people will quit confusing them. Since Roe, more than fifty million human fetuses (or for all any person knows really: human beings in their fetal stages) have been launched into eternity by pointy medical instruments. Roe and its progeny say that all of this killing is constitutionally permissible because, in keeping with the English common law, the human fetus or "child unborn" does not qualify as a 5th (14th) Amendment due process clause person. What if the Roe justices got this wrong—for lack of a "working knowledge" of the status of the human fetus (or unborn child) and abortion at the English common law? Philip Rafferty, through a working knowledge of abortion prosecution at the English common law, demonstrates that the Roe justices certainly got this wrong. So forget everything you think you know about the abortion controversy. It's time to know What's Really Going On.

In this seminal work, Dr. Szasz examines the similarities between the Inquisition and institutional psychiatry. His purpose is to show “that the belief in mental illness and the social actions to which it leads have the same moral implications and political consequences as had the belief in witchcraft and the social actions to which it led.”