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Sex Determination and Differentiation

2004; Massachusetts Medical Society; Volume: 351; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1056/nejm200407153510326

1533-4406

Joel D. Howell,

Sexual Differentiation and Disorders

current understanding of obesity took root, a cult of thinness had developed, from which we have not yet emerged.Eighteenth-century critics shared our contemporary concern about overpopulation.William Godwin trusted individuals to solve the problem, believing that as medicine enabled people to live forever, sexual urges would abate and reproduction would thus cease.Perhaps the most poignant part of this book comes in Porter's discussion of the great historian and autobiographer Edward Gibbon, author of the classic, six-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.Gibbon suffered from a whole host of painful and obvious ailments.But those ailments were merely of the body, subordinate to the life of the enlightened mind.Gibbon did not believe in an immortal soul, but he hoped that his Memoirs would mean that "one day his mind [would] be familiar to the grandchildren of those who are yet unborn."As Porter observed, "His mind will thus live on" through his immortal words.One could make the same observation for the words of Roy Porter, and for that we all should be very thankful.