Bild på författaren.

För andra författare vid namn Thomas Goetz, se särskiljningssidan.

2+ verk 307 medlemmar 54 recensioner

Om författaren

Thomas Goetz is the executive editor of Wired magazine. His writing on science and medicine has been selected for the Best American Science Writing and the Best Technology Writing anthologies. He holds master's degrees in American literature and public health. Goetz lives in San Francisco with his visa mer wife and two sons. visa färre
Foto taget av: Wired

Verk av Thomas Goetz

Associerade verk

The Best American Science Writing 2008 (2008) — Bidragsgivare — 144 exemplar

Taggad

Allmänna fakta

Medlemmar

Recensioner

This is a very tine incident, not really worthy of a book. However, Koch and conan spiwak doyle are each worthy of numerous books and the short profiles on yhem and on their work were well worth it
 
Flaggad
cspiwak | 50 andra recensioner | Mar 6, 2024 |
I expected this book to be something that it wasn't and wish goodreads had a star to reflect that. When I entered to win it from goodreads I thought it would be more about what you can do to be a healthier you--from being proactive by eating healthy, exercising, and using both alternative/complementary medicine, western medicine, and monitoring your own behavior with smart phone aps (or similar technology). But the book is more about envisioning a shift in how people and the medical system need to change from a doctor centered to a patient centered health care system, one where patients are much more pro-active in the care they receive. That sounds great to me, but I am not a fan of the medical system as it is, the AMA, or the FDA and think way too much of the "care" people receive from western medicine is tied into profit for big business. I'm not interested in genetic tests or synthetic drugs. I lean towards the China Study, mind/body awareness, living a healthier lifestyle and alternative medicine, so this book just isn't a good fit for me. I'm passing it on to someone who is more interested in working within the medical system to help transform it from the inside.… (mer)
 
Flaggad
Chris.Wolak | 2 andra recensioner | Oct 13, 2022 |
The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis -by Thomas Goetz
4 stars

It’s difficult to remember a single Victorian novel that doesn’t depict the tragic, wasting death of a character suffering from ‘consumption’. There’s Smike in Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, and Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, not to mention, Puccini’s Mimi and Verdi’s Violetta. Unsurprising that the disease should appear in works of art. The role call of tubercular genius is long: John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Bronte sisters, Chopin, Thoreau, R.L. Stevenson, and on and on. The list continues to grow on into the 21st century, but the progress of the disease has slowed considerably. Thomas Goetz explores that 19th century period of time when tuberculosis was the deadliest disease in the world, accounting for one third of all deaths.

Goetz wants us to get it. He wants us to understand a time when germ theory was not universally accepted and basic precepts of experimental scientific proof were unknown. I knew, generally, about Robert Koch and his medical contributions, but I did not even begin to understand the magnitude of the change that he brought about. This book isn’t just about the scientific discovery of a deadly bacillus. It’s about the seismic cultural shift that took place as a result of Koch’s work. That’s where Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes come into the picture. Sherlock Holmes is the embodiment of the scientific method. As a character he reflects a paradigm shift from folk medicine and quackery to rigorous science.

The book was a bit dry in places, but the biographical information kept it lively. There was also occasionally a subtle imitation of style that I enjoyed. The first sentence in the book, “In train after train, consumptives filled the passenger cars, their hacks and coughs competing with the steam whistles and screaming brakes as the engines came to a halt in Potsdamer Platz.” gives a nod to The Red Headed League, one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories.
Goetz looks critically at these scientific and literary geniuses. He sees the parallels in their accomplishments and in their egotistical failures. He also draws a clear line connecting 19th and 21st century attitudes towards medicine, disease, and science. I had a library copy and couldn’t highlight all of the comments that caught my attention, but here are a few of them.

“An essential part of the [experimental science] system, then as now, is competition. The base human instinct to beat the other guy is an essential characteristic of science, notwithstanding its tweedy reputation.”

“Time and again, medical science was compelling people to change the way they lived, disrupting norms, and putting notions of public health above those of personal rights. The result was an anti-science libertarianism that took umbrage at an increasingly paternalistic state. At every turn, science was being deployed to constrain the public that was poorly equipped to assess the validity of the science.”

“Through Holmes, Conan Doyle helped people see how from a thousand small observations can come a profound and lasting change.”

There’s lots of fodder for discussion in this book. I will be thinking about it for a long time.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
msjudy | 50 andra recensioner | May 30, 2016 |
The story of Robert Koch was interesting, and the book would have been better if that had been the focus. The story of Arthur Conan Doyle (as told here), was okay, and the importance of their intersection was made much more prominent by the subtitle/cover than it should have been.
 
Flaggad
radicarian | 50 andra recensioner | Mar 14, 2016 |

Priser

Du skulle kanske också gilla

Associerade författare

Statistik

Verk
2
Även av
1
Medlemmar
307
Popularitet
#76,700
Betyg
½ 3.7
Recensioner
54
ISBN
14
Språk
1

Tabeller & diagram