In the chapters The Laboratory and Therapies in Roy Porter’s “Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine” Porter takes us through the development of what is modern medicine. Starting at the beginning of the 18th century, Porter describes the many breakthroughs that have shaped the landscape of today’s medical practice: from the stethoscope to the discovery of DNA’s double helix, to germ theory and the invention of penicillin. Advances in biochemistry, biology, nutrition, and even physics all drove medicine away from being centered around the patient and holistic medicine, and more towards a more structuralized and empirical scientific form of medicine, where diseases were distinct entities that caused malady. Porter also discusses a few of