OVERVIEW:
A revolutionary theory of human progress is developed and presented in the four-volume work, The Natural State of Medical Practice. In an informative history of medical practice over the ages, one interspersed with personal observations and anecdotal explanations from his forty years in medical practice, Dr. William Adams identifies broad-based liberty of the common man and woman as the sole explanation for human progress. Eschewing the “Great Man” theory of history and using medical practice as a realistic gauge of societal progress, Dr. Adams provides evidentiary support for many arresting conclusions, including a debunking of theories suggesting Western civilization owes its medical successes to prior civilizations, to Hippocratic medicine, or even to the Renaissance. He provides evidence that human progress was delayed for thousands of years, its prehistorical initiation blocked by the egalitarian authoritarianism of the kinship and its historical maturation disfigured by political authoritarianism of the great civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China. In a profound denigration of authoritarian governance he introduces into the social equation the concept of natural law and the Judeo-Christian ethos of equality of all mankind before God. From this he concludes that the incredible progress of the past three centuries in the West has been the consequence of freedom of conscience following the Reformation that demanded protection of natural rights, thereby releasing the potential of the common man and woman and thus proving that there is no such thing as a common man or woman. To those interested in the history of medicine, political science, anthropology, sociology, contemporary political discourse, and to those actively engaged in clinical medicine today, Dr. Adams counsels that historicism is not dead, that the history of human liberty has yet to be told, and that infractions of the Hippocratic Oath reveal the omnipresence of authoritarian threats not only to medical practice but to human progress in general. The authoritarian is always on the march, this time on a global scale, and the threat to common men and women is great. The magnitude of that threat over the ages is exposed in The Natural State of Medical Practice.
