Pharmacological knowledge among medical students can have a very short 'half life': students often fail not because they have failed to study, but because they have been unable to retain key knowledge and reproduce it in an exam setting. This book takes an alternative route to the conventional approach of comprehensively exploring each individual drug and its features: not only can such an approach overwhelm and make knowledge retention difficult, but the current exam format makes questions structured in this way unlikely anyway. Instead of aiming to be completely comprehensive, it examines drugs systematically by classifications, mechanisms of action, therapeutic uses and side effects, enabling students to gain the distilled, functional grasp of pharmacology that their exams actually demand quickly and clearly.

Drawing on philological studies, social history and anthropology, this book offers the first extended study of the recipes included in the Hippocratic Corpus. It examines the links between oral and written traditions in the transmission of ancient pharmacological knowledge.

In the past 20 years micronutrients have assumed great public health importance and a considerable amount of research has lead to increasing knowledge of their physiological role. Because it is a rapidly developing field, the WHO and FAO convened an Expert Consultation to evaluate the current state of knowledge. It had three main tasks: to review the full scope of vitamin and minerals requirements; to draft and adopt a report which would provide recommended nutrient intakes for vitamins A, C, D, E, and K; the B vitamins; calcium; iron; magnesium; zinc; selenium; and iodine; to identify key issues for future research and make preliminary recommendations for the handbook. This report contains the outcome of the Consultation, combined with up-to-date evidence that has since become available.