Introduction
1: Pre-Christian Healing Places
2: Early Christian Hospitality: Shelters and Infirmaries
3: Church and Laity: Partnership in Hospital Care
4: Hospitals as Segregation and Confinement Tools: Leprosy and
Plague
5: Enlightenment: Medicalization of the Hospital
6: Human Bodies Revealed: Hospitals in Post-Revolutionary Paris
7: Modern Surgery in Hospitals: Development of Anesthesia and
Antisepsis
8: The Limits of Medical Science: Hospitals in Fin de Siècle Europe
and America
9: Main Streets Civic Pride: The American General Hospital as
Professional Workshop
10: Hospitals at the Crossroads: Government, Society, and
Catholicism in America, 1950-1975
11: Hospitals as Biomedical Showcases: Academic Health Centers and
Organ Transplantation
12: Caring for the Incurable: AIDS at San Francisco General
Hospital
13: Conclusion: Towards the Next Millennium: Hospitals as Houses of
Technology
"The author takes his readers from Greek and Roman times through
the pangs of suffering in the early Christian era, the surge of the
Enlightenment as exemplified by Edinburgh, Vienna, and Paris, to
surgeons such as Warren and Lister and the modern research giants
of municipal mercy. Just to review this immense background of our
ere is a great treat; Dr. Risse's abundant research and
sophisticated interpretation makes this book an intellectual
triumph."--Francis
D. Moore, MD, Moseley Professor of Surgery, Emeritus, Harvard
Medical School
"Dr. Risse brings the patient, pilgrim to the "foreign land" of
hospitals, to the center of this magnificent, poignant history of
medicine. Telling the experiences of actual patients, doctors, and
others in hospitals at different times and in different places,
Risse brings the hospital to life, vividly, as a place of rituals
where some human beings struggle to live; others do the best they
can in the face of available medical knowledge and often
dangerous
social conditions. A remarkable, moving, humane book -- a major
contribution to the history of medicine, and highly recommended for
the general reader."--Rosemary A. Stevens, Stanley I. Sheerr
Endowed Term
Professor in Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
"This book, carefully documented and replete with important detail,
will be the standard reference for the 'long history' of the
Western hospital. It belongs on the shelf with other excellent
works that have focused on 19th- and 20th-century hospitals,
notably Rosenberg's the Care of Strangers: The Rise of America's
Hospital System (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)."
--Choice
"Mending Bodies, Saving Souls is an astonishing achievement, and
the author's coverage over space and time is awe-inspiring....it
lends historical perspective to such recent renewals of
institutional community as AIDS wards and hospices for the
dying."--Science
"Told in 12 clinical episodes, this is the story of Western
hospitals from ancient Greece through the Enlightenment to the late
20th century. It's also told with a patient's voice, which makes it
possible for contemporary readers to recover a sense of past
meanings for patients and providers. Carefully documented and
replete with important details, it will be the standard reference
for the long history of the Western hospital."--Hospitals and
Health
Networks
"The author takes his readers from Greek and Roman times through
the pangs of suffering in the early Christian era, the surge of the
Enlightenment as exemplified by Edinburgh, Vienna, and Paris, to
surgeons such as Warren and Lister and the modern research giants
of municipal mercy. Just to review this immense background of our
ere is a great treat; Dr. Risse's abundant research and
sophisticated interpretation makes this book an intellectual
triumph."--Francis
D. Moore, MD, Moseley Professor of Surgery, Emeritus, Harvard
Medical School
"Dr. Risse brings the patient, pilgrim to the "foreign land" of
hospitals, to the center of this magnificent, poignant history of
medicine. Telling the experiences of actual patients, doctors, and
others in hospitals at different times and in different places,
Risse brings the hospital to life, vividly, as a place of rituals
where some human beings struggle to live; others do the best they
can in the face of available medical knowledge and often
dangerous
social conditions. A remarkable, moving, humane book -- a major
contribution to the history of medicine, and highly recommended for
the general reader."--Rosemary A. Stevens, Stanley I. Sheerr
Endowed Term
Professor in Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
"This is an extraordinary book...massively ambitious in tackling
its subject literally from beginning to end. It is impeccably
researched and written in an engaging...clear style. Few historians
would have the audacity to undertake Risse's brief, and he has
succeeded beyond a shadow of a doubt. The publication of this book
will be a major event in medical history."--Professor William F.
Bynum, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine
"In Mending Bodies, Saving Souls, Guenter Risse presents a bumper
history of hospitals that overrides all stereotypes and illuminates
the whole of medical history.Science
Risse has written a superb book that is likely to become the
authoritative one-volume history of hospitals. If a knowledge of
medical history provides health care professionals with a broad
view that informs their understanding of present trends, there can
be few hospital staff members who will not benefit from reading
this book.Ihe New England Journal of Medicine
MENDING, BODIES, SAVING SOULS Presents an ambitious and
meticulously documented history of institutional care of the
sick.--JAMA
"[Risse's] text brings together a treasure trove of fascinating
material, skillfuly organized, and frequently poignant in its
impace...a brilliant treatment."--Bulletin of the History of
Medicine
"Risse's story this becomes a history of health and medicine, while
never losing its focus on the patient and the hospital." --New
Jersy Medicine
"...a tour de force which matches considerable intellectual and
historiographical ambition with humane and punctilious scholarship.
Risse tells the relatively well-rehearsed story in a distinctive
and highly appealing way which will provide pleasure as well as
instruction to social, economic, cultural historians as well as to
historians of medicine."--Medical History, July 2001
"Guenter Risse's life's work has gone into this massive history of
the hospital in the West. It stands besides Roy Porter's history of
medicine, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, yet in many ways is a
more profound and accomplished work. It is certainly more original
and takes greater risks both in its conception and its
execution.--Health & History, February 2000
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