Roy Porter Quotes

3 Sourced Quotes

The cultural tradition of which the Greek language is the focal point has the longest unbroken history of any in Europe. The Greek state, however, was newly born out of the conflict of 1821-8 and was without precedent in the history of the Greeks. The newly defined nation therefore had, as a matter of urgency, to create its own past, that is, to select and endorse those elements of earlier Greek history which retrospectively could claim to have made the present existence and future aspirations of the nation inevitable. Since the state itself was in many ways the creation of European Romanticism, it was only natural that the means to hand for defining and justifying its existence should derive from the same source.

Roy Porter

Doctors and consumers are becoming locked within a fantasy that everyone has something wrong with them, everyone and everything can be cured.

Roy Porter

Medicine is a notoriously messy mix of laboratory research and clinical crisis, the itch for knowledge and the need to act. Different experts contribute diverse skills, and the whole has been likened to a jigsaw [puzzle] being pieced together by total strangers, each of whom is only guessing at the picture.

Roy Porter

Roy Porter

Roy Porter

Born: December 31, 1946

Died: March 3, 2002 (aged 55)

Bio: Roy Sydney Porter was a British historian known for his important work on the history of medicine. He retired in 2001 from the director of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine at University College, London.

Known for:

London: A Social History (1994)
Madness: A Brief History (2002)
Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine (2002)
English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982)

Roy Porter on Wikipedia

Suggest an edit or a new quote

British Historian Quotes

Historian Quotes

20th-century Historian Quotes