Books like The body in history by John Robb

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were taken in 1951 without her consent and later became the first immortal human cell line, HeLa, driving major scientific breakthroughs while raising questions of ethics, race, and medical exploitation.

"Starting with the grim Britain of the Civil War era, with its punishing sense of the body as a corrupt vessel for the soul, Roy Porter charts how, through figures as diverse as Locke, Swift, Johnson, and Gibbon, ideas about medicine, politics, and religion fundamentally changed notions of self. He shows how the Enlightenment (with its explosion or rational thinking and scientific invention of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) provided a lens through which we can best see the profound shift from the theocentric, otherwordly, Dark Ages to the modern, earthly, body-centered world we live in today. As man made in God's image gave way to the Enlightenment's notion of the Self-made man, the body moved center stage. Porter writes brilliantly on the ways in which men and women flaunted, decorated, tanned, and dieted themselves: activities that we find familiar but that a Puritan divine would have considered satanic. And he explores how, at the end of the century, the human soul took on a new significance in the works of Godwin, Blake, and Byron."--BOOK JACKET.