How long does it take to read The Greatest Benefit to Mankind?
a medical history of humanity from antiquity to the present
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind by Roy Porter takes about 15 hours 14 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 15 hours 14 minutes
A long haul
First published 1997. 831 pages, about 228,525 words.
31 days (about 5 weeks) at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 25 hours 24 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 15 hours 14 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 9 hours 31 minutes |
The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"Roy Porter explores medicine's evolution against the backdrop of the wider religious, scientific, philosophical, and political beliefs of the culture in which it develops, and he shows how our need to understand where diseases come from and what we can do to control them has - perhaps above all elseinspired developments in medicine through the ages. He charts the remarkable rise of modern medical science - the emergence of specialties such as anatomy, physiology, neurology, and bacteriology - as well as the accompanying development of wider medical practice at the bedside, in the hospital, and in the ambitious public health systems of the twentieth century. Along the way the book offers up a treasure trove of historical surprises: how the ancient Egyptians treated incipient baldness with a mixture of hippopotamus, lion, crocodile, goose, snake, and ibex fat; how a mystery epidemic devastated ancient Athens and brought an end to the domination of that great city: how lemons did as much as Nelson to defeat Napoleon: how yellow fever, carried by African mosquitoes to the Americas, led the French to fail utterly in their attempts to recover Haiti after the slave revolt of 1790: and how the explorers of the South Seas brought both syphilis to Tahiti and tuberculosis and measles to the Maoris."--Jacket.
Subjects: History, Medicine, Social medicine, Histoire, Medizin, Geschichte
