Reviewer Nicholas Efstathiou: Nicholas is a husband and father, as well as an avid student of military history. He holds a bachelor's in English Literature and a master's in Military History. He and his wife Carol, along with their three children, live in New England.
Author: Nathan Belofsky
ISBN: 978-0-399-15995-4
Author: Nathan Belofsky
ISBN: 978-0-399-15995-4
Belofsky’s work is full of medical practices that really can’t possibly have happened...but they did. These medical practices go from the shocking to the terrible, with death and maiming seemingly at every turn in his well spun narrative. The information has been culled from numerous sources -- all of which are arranged in an excellent bibliography should you wish to give yourself further medical based nightmares -- and makes you wonder how the human race could have possibly survived into the twentieth century with the assistance of doctors.
Doctors are, without a doubt, the villains of this story, though only a few of them actually seem to be natural sadists. The nature of Western medicine, as displayed by Belofsky, simply seems to lean towards the sadistic, as seen in the simple fact that anesthesia was frowned upon since it was obviously God’s will that patients suffer, and who were the doctor’s to go against God’s will. You could, in fact, even be put to death for asking for pain relief during a medical procedure, so you were better off just accepting the pain and dealing with it.