Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine

Modern allopathic medicine likes to think of itself as having sprung straight from the robotic, sterile loins of rational scientific thought, but its origins are far more fascinating, colorful, and diverse. In this book you'll find the history of contemporary medicine's precursors that are disavowed or called "alternative" by today's practitioners: the herbal remedies, bloodletting hypnotic suggestion, water cures, and other treatments considered to be the most modern of medicine in the 19th Century United States. This book isn't particularly friendly towards the alternative medical treatments it describes, but is interesting nonetheless.

(This book may contain a small mark on the bottom edge; in the publishing industry this means that it cannot be returned to another wholesaler.)