Curiosities of Medical Experience

What do obesity, magnetism, royal physicians, and the medical follies of centuries past have in common? In this wildly entertaining early 19th-century compendium, J. G. Millingen turns his curious eye on the strange, often absurd world of medicine before it became a science. With sharp wit and genuine fascination, he dismantles the权威 of fashionable medical doctrines, recounts bizarre healing practices that would horrify any modern doctor, and populates his pages with historical figures whose bodily quirks became legendary. This is medicine as cabinet of curiosities: part satire, part genuine inquiry, always delightfully strange. Millingen challenges readers to consider how much of what passes for medical wisdom is simply fashion, superstition, or flatulence of the intellectual variety. For anyone who delights in the history of the body, the eccentricity of past thinkers, or simply wants to marvel at how wrong yesterday's experts could be, this book is a treasure.