My favorite book is Blood and Guts by Richard Hollingham. It talks about the history of surgery and how many people had to suffer in the name of progress for the medical field. Today, surgical practices have been perfected over decades of bloodshed and agony because doctors in the past experimented on the human body and learned from their most grisly failures.
I'm really interested in psychology as well, and I know that it has an arguably even darker history than that of surgery. Psychological experiments could border on torture – sometimes, they were exactly that. The study of trauma is what interests me the most, and I've read historical cases of doctors purposely traumatizing even children just to study it or see if it could be reversed. On top of that, they had what we now understand to be ludicrous proposed treatments for mental illness and the exasperated suffering of those packed into asylums. Doctors studied victims of abuse, the brains of deceased patients, and soldiers returning from war. In fact, it was the recognition of ptsd that really advanced the study of psychology!
I want to read a book that touches on these sorts of things in a way that Richard Hollingham touched on the bloody history of different fields of medicine!
by legacy-of-rats