The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine

In the years following World War II, medicine won major battles against

smallpox, diphtheria, and polio. In the same period it also produced

treatments to control the progress of Parkinson's, rheumatoid arthritis, and

schizophrenia. It made realities of open-heart surgery, organ transplants,

test-tube babies. Unquestionably, the medical accomplishments of the postwar

years stand at the forefront of human endeavor, yet progress in recent decades

has slowed nearly to a halt. In this judicious examination of medicine in our

times, which has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, medical doctor and

columnist James Le Fanu both surveys the glories of medicine in the postwar

years and analyzes the factors that for the past twenty-five years have

increasingly widened the gulf between achievement and advancement: the social

theories of medicine, ethical issues, and political debates over health care

that have hobbled the development of vaccines and discovery of new -miracle-

cures. While fully demonstrating the extraordinary progress effected by

medical research in the latter half of the twentieth century, Le Fanu also

identifies the perils that confront medicine in the twenty-first. 16 pages of

black-and-white photographs add to what the Los Angeles Times cited as -a

sobering, contrarian challenge- to the -nostrum of medicine as a never-ending

font of 'miracle cures'.- -[From] a respected science writer ... important

information that ... has been overlooked or ignored by many physicians.---New

Republic -Provocative and engrossing and informative.---Houston Chronicle

-Marvelously written, meticulously researched ... one of the most thought-

provoking and important works to appear in recent years.---Choice