Looking at urban history, this work balances statistics with the words of historians, diarists and novelists, poets and churchmen such as: Pepys, Boswell, Fielding, Walpole, Blake, Mayhew, Wells, Woolf, and Spark. It is a celebration of the city and also an elegy for its decline, with statistics and anecdote, from Boadicea to Betjeman.

'Yet another compulsively readable, astonishingly encyclopaedic book from Roy Porter!his best to date: an epic, one-volume narrative history of man's struggle with the infirmities of his body, from Aesculapius to AIDS.' SIMON SCHAMA

This analysis of the Russian Revolution uses information from both Western and Russian sources. In this third edition, there is a brief survey of the historical literature introducing each chapter. It covers not only the politics but also society and economics.

This work explores what we really mean by madness , covering an enormous range of topics from witches to creative geniuses, electric shock therapy to sexual deviancy, psychoanalysis to prozac.

Surveys the rise of medicine in the West from classical times to the present.

A portrait of 18th century England, from its princes to its paupers, from its metropolis to its smallest hamlet. It covers topics that include - diet, housing, prisons, rural festivals, bordellos, plays, paintings, and work and wages.

For generations the traditional focus for those wishing to understand the roots of the modern world has been France on the eve of the Revolution. Porter certainly acknowledges France's importance, but here makes an overwhelming case for consideringBritain the true home of modernity - a country driven by an exuberance, diversity and power of invention comparable only to twentieth-century America. P

The Holy Roman Empire has caused confusion for students of European history, and this book sets out to provide a clear account of this organization comparable in many ways only to the modern European Union and its profound impact during its three centuries of existence.

The great ideas of science, from the first 'Eureka!' to the cloning of Dolly the sheep, can be found in this collection. A reference tool, it also presents the human face of science, as scientists talk about achievements and failures in their own lives, and in those of others.

This text, now in a fully updated second edition, sympathetically explores the complexities of the Enlightenment. Synthesizing and evaluating the scholarship, it offers a comprehensive vision of this many faceted movement.

Discusses about millennia of human ingenuity in the quest to cheat death. This book features various chapters that sum up one of these battlefields such as surgery, doctors, disease, hospitals, laboratories and the human body. It is suitable for those who are keenly aware of their own mortality and wants to do something about it.

In this work, Roy Porter takes a critical look at representations of the body in death, disease and health, and at images of the healing arts in Britain from the mid-17th to the 20th century.

Mankind's battle to stay alive is the greatest of all subjects. This brief, witty and unusual book by Britain's greatest medical historian compresses into a tiny span a lifetime spent thinking about millennia of human ingenuity in the quest to cheat death. Each chapter sums up one of these battlefields (surgery, doctors, disease, hospitals, laboratories and the human body) in a way that is both

For generations the traditional focus for those wishing to understand the roots of the modern world has been France on the eve of the Revolution. This work makes a case for considering Britain the true home of modernity - a country driven by an exuberance, diversity and power of invention comparable only to twentieth-century America.

The culmination of a lifelong interest in the metaphysics of the body by the premier social historian of medicine. How did we come to a modern understanding of our bodies and souls? What were the breakthroughs that allowed human beings to see themselves in a new light?

It provides a much-needed account of the very latest historical scholarship.

An authoritative and accessible illustrated introduction to medical history.

International essays exploring the rise of the lunatic asylum in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Offers a survey of early medical ethics in the eighteenth century. This book focusses on the relationship between the ethical dilemmas of actual practice and the formulations of philosophically-minded physicians. It also examines the historical and philosophical roots of late Enlightenment medical-ethical theories.