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Insightful, informed, and at times controversial in its conclusions, A Short History of Medicine offers an exceptional introduction to the major and many minor facets of its subject. In this lively, learned, and wholly engrossing volume, F. González-Crussi presents a brief yet authoritative five-hundred-year history of the science, the philosophy, and the controversies of modern medicine. While this illuminating work mainly explores Western medicine over the past five centuries, González-Crussi also describes how modern medicine’s roots extend to both Greco-Roman antiquity and Eastern medical traditions. Covered here in engaging detail are the birth of anatomy and the practice of dissections; the transformation of surgery from a gruesome art to a sophisticated medical specialty; a short history of infectious diseases; the evolution of the diagnostic process; advances in obstetrics and anesthesia; and modern psychiatric therapies and the challenges facing organized medicine today. Written by a renowned author and educator, this book gives us the very essence of our search to mitigate suffering, save lives, and unlock the mysteries of the human animal. “[González-Crussi fuses] science, literature, and personal history into highly civilized artifacts.” –The Washington Post, on There Is a World Elsewhere

"Six beautifully wrought meditations on the art of embalming and related matters.... Dr. Gonzalez-Crussi's tone is measured, grave, and curiously formal ... with] a mordant sense of humor ... and a] courtliness and peculiar charm of his rococo style ... muscular dandyism as well as his sly and faintly risque humor...." " He] is learned, compassionate, genuinely witty and, at the most unexpected moments, strangely moving.... His learning, his diligence, his lively curiosity, together make a formidable lens that he brings to bear upon the enigma of what we are and how we cease to be..." " He] has delivered a missive that, though the envelope may give off a whiff of formalin, is in its essence a love letter to life, in all its strangeness, beauty, and mystery." --John Banville, "The New York Times Book Review " "More graceful, erudite, and mind-expanding essays from Gonzalez-Crussi, this time accompanied by haunting, beautiful color photographs of skeletons, skulls, medical specimens, and anatomical models. In writing that smoothly integrates medical science, history, philosophy, literature, and the arts, Gonzalez-Crussi ponders the human condition.... The opening of a Gonzalez-Crussi essay gives few hints as to where it may wander, but the journey is always rewarding." --Kirkus Reviews "Gonzalez-Crussi ... weaves and bobs around monstrosity and death like a python about its victim--and he is nearly as mesmerizing." --Publishers Weekly

Sight is almost unanimously regarded as the sense most vital to our day-to-day survival and awareness of the world around us. It is also the sense that dominates our subconscious and our dreams, and from the earliest efforts in the arts, painters and sculptors have explored the boundaries between these two states. In this elegantly written and probing examination of vision, award-winning author F. Gonzalez-Crussi explores the breadth of fascinating phenomena associated with seeing. From ancient myth (Actaeon's illicit glimpse of the bathing Diana), to eighteenth-century France (when two voyeurs sparked a bloody anti-royalist riot on the Champs-de-Mars), to modern-day advances in microscopy and photography, Gonzalez-Crussi surveys the ways in which, through the sense of sight, perceiver and perceived are inextricably joined, each affecting the other in a profound way, and how our awareness of this union has led to millennia of curious preoccupations. With its spectacular breadth, insight, wit, and fascinating detail. On Seeing is a vastly entertaining book that enlarges our awareness of the world around us. Book jacket.

A broad and riveting cultural history of physiognomy, exploring how the desire to divine deeper meaning from our looks has compelled humans for millennia. How do you read a face? For thousands of years, artists, philosophers, and scientists have explored the question of what our outer appearance might reveal about our inner selves. In The Language of the Face, a marvelously comprehensive exploration of the pseudoscience of physiognomy, Frank Gonzalez-Crussi considers over a millennium’s worth of primary sources to paint a splendid portrait of the face’s cultural symbology. Gonzalez-Crussi, an acclaimed pathologist and writer, transcends disciplines with a singular balance of depth and levity. Blending literary analysis of both ancient and modern texts with the insights of medical anthropology, his narrative ranges from an investigation into “nasal semiotics”—a subject whose legacy persists most destructively in myths of racial typology—to equally astute analyses of the thrills of the erotic kiss, the diagnostic art of astrology, and the enlightening qualities of supposed ugliness. While our appearances may ultimately be no more than surface-level signifiers of identity, Gonzalez-Crussi’s work is anything but superficial in its treatment of the consummately human urge to find profound meaning amidst seemingly arbitrary attributes. As rigorously researched as it is wildly entertaining, The Language of the Face is a vibrant contribution to both the emerging field of medical humanities and the popular understanding of aesthetics and physiology at large.