Our next Medical History highlight comes from January 2000 and Ron Numbers, who provided the 13th Chapter in the supplement Medical Geography in Historical Perspective. Numbers’ full chapter ‘Medical science before scientific medicine: Reflections on the history of medical geography’ is currently available free to access via the Medical History website (follow the link below)! “Historians of medicine frequently recount the heroic late-nineteenth-century birth of scientific medicine, commonly characterized by laboratories and bacteriology. Contemporaries such as William Osler believed that scientific medicine constituted a new school of medicine, fundamentally different from the pre-scientific sects of the preceeding period. Although no one, then or now, has denied the existence of medical science before the advent of the germ theory, the conventional narrative has led many unwary students-and not a few scholars-into believing that little medical science existed before the rise of scientific medicine. Such a view is not only Whiggish, in that it measures past theories and practices by current standards, but wrong, in that it fails to recognize the range of medically related scientific activities that did take place: in the classroom, in the field, and at the bedside. Unquestionably, the pace of medical research quickened in the late nineteenth century, but, as the preceding essays compellingly illustrate, there was considerable research in the medical community before the rise of the experimental laboratory. During the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, medical geography, broadly conceived, reigned as the queen of the medical sciences…” dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300073361
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 11:05:11 +0000
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