{"title":"Books by David Wootton","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780199212798","title":"Bad Medicine","description":"Just how much good has medicine done over the years? And how much damage does it continue to do? The history of medicine begins with Hippocrates in the fifth century BC. Yet until the invention of antibiotics in the 1930s doctors, in general, did their patients more harm than good. In this fascinating new look at the history of medicine, David Wootton argues that for more than 2300 years doctors have relied on their patients' misplaced faith in their ability to cure. Over and over again major discoveries which could save lives were met with professional resistance. And this is not just a phenomenon of the distant past. The first patient effectively treated with penicillin was in the 1880s; the second not until the 1940s. There was overwhelming evidence that smoking caused lung cancer in the 1950s; but it took thirty years for doctors to accept the claim that smoking was addictive. As Wootton graphically illustrates, throughout history and right up to the present, bad medical practice has often been deeply entrenched and stubbornly resistant to evidence. This is a bold and challenging book - and the first general history of medicine to acknowledge the frequency with which doctors do harm.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43201522237618,"sku":"9780199212798","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780199212798_e2b0ce5a-a530-4e1a-8b44-5988ced58448.jpg?v=1786033343"},{"product_id":"9780141040837","title":"The Invention of Science","description":"\u003cp\u003eWe live in a world made by science. How and when did this happen? This book tells the story of the extraordinary intellectual and cultural revolution that gave birth to modern science, and mounts a major challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of its history.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBefore 1492 it was assumed that all significant knowledge was already available; there was no concept of progress; people looked for understanding to the past not the future. This book argues that the discovery of America demonstrated that new knowledge was possible: indeed it introduced the very concept of 'discovery', and opened the way to the invention of science.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe first crucial discovery was Tycho Brahe's nova of 1572: proof that there could be change in the heavens. The telescope (1610) rendered the old astronomy obsolete. Torricelli's experiment with the vacuum (1643) led directly to the triumph of the experimental method in the Royal Society of Boyle and Newton. By 1750 Newtonianism was being celebrated throughout Europe.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe new science did not consist simply of new discoveries, or new methods. It relied on a new understanding of what knowledge might be, and with this came a new language: discovery, progress, facts, experiments, hypotheses, theories, laws of nature - almost all these terms existed before 1492, but their meanings were radically transformed so they became tools with which to think scientifically. We all now speak this language of science, which was invented during the Scientific Revolution.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe new culture had its martyrs (Bruno, Galileo), its heroes (Kepler, Boyle), its propagandists (Voltaire, Diderot), and its patient labourers (Gilbert, Hooke). It led to a new rationalism, killing off alchemy, astrology, and belief in witchcraft. It led to the invention of the steam engine and to the first Industrial Revolution. David Wootton's landmark book changes our understanding of how this great transformation came about, and of what science is.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56224242762101,"sku":"9780141040837","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780141040837_be4121f3-b658-4d17-bc13-56e05c090424.jpg?v=1786015708"},{"product_id":"9781915670274","title":"Peter Cameron","description":"Peter Cameron (b. 1947) took up art while serving a prison sentence, and later described his incarceration as a career move. On his release in 1992, he received the support of the Koestler Trust and was able to evolve from post-prison survivor to celebrated artist with a substantial body of work. In 2003, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which took his art in a new direction, emphasising the movement that increasingly eluded him. Peter’s is an inspiring story of survival and real-life grit, richly illustrated and narrated, and embellished with Peter’s own lively anecdotes.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56420159979893,"sku":"9781915670274","price":35.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781915670274_fd781942-28a1-4d5d-8653-6a294cc065ac.jpg?v=1786030883"},{"product_id":"power-pleasure-and-profit","title":"Power, Pleasure, and Profit – Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison","description":"A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents.   We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning—cost-benefit analysis—to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives.   Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought—from Machiavelli to Madison—to show how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution. As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore in the work of writers both obscure and as famous as Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith. The new instrumental reasoning cut through old codes of status and rank, enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality. But it also helped to create a world in which virtue, honor, shame, and guilt count for almost nothing, and what matters is success.   Is our world better for the rise of instrumental reasoning? To answer that question, Wootton writes, we must first recognize that we live in its grip.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481466249589,"sku":"9780674976672","price":29.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674976672.jpg?v=1786089729"},{"product_id":"divine-right-and-democracy","title":"Divine Right and Democracy","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe seventeenth century was England’s century of revolution, an era in which the nation witnessed protracted civil wars, the execution of a king, and the declaration of a short-lived republic. During this period of revolutionary crisis, political writers of all persuasions hoped to shape the outcome of events by the force of their arguments. To read the major political theorists of Stuart England is to be plunged into a world in which many of our modern conceptions of political rights and social change are first formulated.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDavid Wootton's masterly compilation of speeches, essays, and fiercely polemical pamphlets--organized into chapters focusing on the main debates of the century--represents the first attempt to present in one volume a broad collection of Stuart political thought. In bringing together abstract theorizing and impassioned calls to arms, anonymous tract writers and King James I, Wootton has produced a much-needed collection; in combination with the editor’s thoughtful running commentary and invaluable Introduction, its texts bring to life a crucial period in the formation of our modern liberal and conservative theories.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481541648757,"sku":"9780872206533","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780872206533.jpg?v=1786089810"},{"product_id":"the-broken-seal","title":"The Broken Seal","description":"A vivid account of the dramatic fight between Voltaire, Émilie Du Châtelet, and Françoise de Graffigny—and how it offers surprising new insights about the wellsprings of the EnlightenmentIn the winter of 1738–1739, three Enlightenment writers—Voltaire, the most celebrated author of his age; his lover Émilie Du Châtelet, a brilliant philosopher and mathematician; and Françoise de Graffigny, the most successful female novelist of the eighteenth century—found themselves uneasily sharing a country house at Cirey-sur-Blaise in Champagne. In a creative but volatile world of salons, scientific controversy, and literary innovation, where dangerous writings circulated in secret and reputations were precarious, the writers soon fell out on a grand scale. In The Broken Seal, acclaimed historian David Wootton vividly tells the story of this dramatic quarrel—and what it reveals about the surprising forces behind the calm facade of the Age of Reason.   The tensions at Cirey blew up on December 29th, 1738, when Du Châtelet, who had been secretly opening letters addressed to Voltaire and Graffigny, accused Graffigny of copying and sharing a portion of La Pucelle, Voltaire’s scandalous unpublished poem, risking its wider circulation and Voltaire’s arrest. The crisis proved to be a turning point for all three writers. In its aftermath, Voltaire moved toward the narrative voice that would culminate in Candide, Du Châtelet distanced herself intellectually from Voltaire, and Graffigny drew on the experience in her bestselling novel Letters of a Peruvian Woman.   An intimate account of how ideas are lived, The Broken Seal offers new insights into the birth of modern thought, the struggle for women’s intellectual freedom, the history of the novel, and the emotional lives behind reason and philosophy.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57680227959157,"sku":"9780691290492","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-david-wootton.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}