The Worst of Evils

The Worst of Evils

Thomas Dormandy • Yale University Press

ISBN-10: 0300186754 · ISBN-13: 978‑0300186758 · 2006 · FIRST EDITION

Live offer for this book: 15 live copies of this book from $6 (as of 2026-09-05).

Dimensions: 0.9 × 0.6 × 0.1 in

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Completeness 46

Cover quality: good

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The Worst of Evils: The Fight Against Pain by Thomas Dormandy, M.D. - First Edition (2006, Hardcover with dust jacket). Previously owned. Condition is "Good" with noticeable damage to the bottom front end of the book, causing a cover indent and bottom page flaws through the first hundred pages. Other flaws include a small tear on the top side of the dust jacket. Also some noticeable scratches to the back dust jacket. Otherwise book is is Very Good condition with a very tight binding/spine, and crisp and clean pages, no writings/markings. See pictures. Shipped with USPS Media Mail. This riveting book takes the reader around the globe and through the centuries to discover how different cultures have sought to combat and treat physical pain. With colorful stories and sometimes frightening anecdotes, Dr. Thomas Dormandy describes a checkered progression of breakthroughs, haphazard experiments, ignorant attitudes, and surprising developments in human efforts to control pain. Attitudes toward pain and its perception have changed, as have the means of pain relief and scientific understanding. Dr. Dormandy offers a thoroughly fascinating, multi-cultural history that culminates with a discussion of today’s successes—and failures—in the struggle against pain. The book’s exploration is fused with accounts of the development of specific methods of pain relief, including the use of alcohol, plants, hypnosis, religious faith, stoic attitudes, local anesthesia, general anesthesia, and modern analgesics. Dr. Dormandy also looks at the most recent advances in pain clinics and palliative care for patients with terminal disease as well as the prospects for loosening pain’s grip in the future. From Scientific American A 560-page history of anesthesia sounds like perfect operating-room readingyou would fall asleep before page two. The Worst of Evils, however, is a chatty book, sprinkled with anecdotes and Thomas Dormandys opinionssome very interesting though apropos of nothingon everything from the French Revolution to the Iraq War. The tome is also a history of pain itself, beginning with the ideas of the ancient Greeks and Romans and ending with contemporary medical pain management. But more than anything else, Dormandy tells the story of the men (very few women appear) who were important to the fi ght against pain, from Galen in Rome (who compiled medical knowledge around A.D. 200) and early Islamic thinkers to the founders of the modern hospice movement. Dormandy, a retired pathologist in London, is fascinated by the lives of the chemists, physicians and researchers who advanced our understanding of pain and the means to dull or abolish it. He tells good stories, especially when dealing with 18th- and 19th-century Europe, when science came into its own. One chapter is devoted to three generations of RenoirsPierre-Auguste Renoir, the impressionist painter, suffered from rheumatoid arthritiswhereas another discusses Rasputin, the evil holy man whose hypnotic powers helped to ease the pain suffered by Russian Tsar Nicholas IIs hemophiliac son. In addition to lively, clever writing, Dormandy makes several good points. He provides vivid descriptions of just how awful surgery was for doctor and patient before anesthesia. He reminds us that many religious and medical fi gures initially denounced anesthetics because they believed suffering ennobled patients and that pain was endorsed by the Bible. The Worst of Evils also has a cynical history of the rise of pharmaceuticals as big business, with aspirin leading the way. What is missing, however, is the science. Given Dormandys own background, how could a book with detailed histories of the introduction of ether and chloroform, the fi rst effective anesthetics for surgery, fail to say a single word about how either chemical works?

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