It All Depends on the Dose: Poisons and Medicines in European History (The History of Medicine in Context) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1138697613 ISBN 13: 9781138697614

Publisher: Routledge, 2018

Synopsis

This is the first volume to take a broad historical sweep of the close relation between medicines and poisons in the Western tradition, and their interconnectedness. They are like two ends of a spectrum, for the same natural material can be medicine or poison, depending on the dose, and poisons can be transformed into medicines, while medicines can turn out to be poisons. The book looks at important moments in the history of the relationship between poisons and medicines in European history, from Roman times, with the Greek physician Galen, through the Renaissance and the maverick physician Paracelsus, to the present, when poisons are actively being turned into beneficial medicines.

Chapter 5 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.

About this title

About the Author

Ole Peter Grell is Professor in Early Modern History at The Open University, U.K.

Andrew Cunningham was formerly Senior Research Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, U.K.

Jon Arrizabalaga is Research Professor in History of Science at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Institución Milà i Fontanals, Barcelona, Spain.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1138697613
• ISBN 13: 9781138697614
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 258
• Editor: Grell Ole Peter, Cunningham Andrew, Arrizabalaga Jon