Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century

Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century PDF

Author: W. F. Bynum

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1994-05-27

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780521272056

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Prior to the nineteenth century, the practice of medicine in the Western world was as much art as science. But, argues W. F. Bynum, 'modern' medicine as practiced today is built upon foundations that were firmly established between 1800 and the beginning of World War I. He demonstrates this in terms of concepts, institutions, and professional structures that evolved during this crucial period, applying both a more traditional intellectual approach to the subject and the newer social perspectives developed by recent historians of science and medicine. In a wide-ranging survey, Bynum examines the parallel development of biomedical sciences such as physiology, pathology, bacteriology, and immunology, and of clinical practice and preventive medicine in nineteenth-century Europe and North America. Focusing on medicine in the hospitals, the community, and the laboratory, Bynum contends that the impact of science was more striking on the public face of medicine and the diagnostic skills of doctors than it was on their actual therapeutic capacities.

Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America

Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America PDF

Author: Carla Bittel

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2012-06-01

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 1469606445

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In the late nineteenth century, as Americans debated the "woman question," a battle over the meaning of biology arose in the medical profession. Some medical men claimed that women were naturally weak, that education would make them physically ill, and that women physicians endangered the profession. Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906), a physician from New York, worked to prove them wrong and argued that social restrictions, not biology, threatened female health. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America is the first full-length biography of Mary Putnam Jacobi, the most significant woman physician of her era and an outspoken advocate for women's rights. Jacobi rose to national prominence in the 1870s and went on to practice medicine, teach, and conduct research for over three decades. She campaigned for co-education, professional opportunities, labor reform, and suffrage--the most important women's rights issues of her day. Downplaying gender differences, she used the laboratory to prove that women were biologically capable of working, learning, and voting. Science, she believed, held the key to promoting and producing gender equality. Carla Bittel's biography of Jacobi offers a piercing view of the role of science in nineteenth-century women's rights movements and provides historical perspective on continuing debates about gender and science today.

Medical America in the Nineteenth Century

Medical America in the Nineteenth Century PDF

Author: Gert H. Brieger

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2009-05-18

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0801892686

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Students of the history of medicine and of American history in general will welcome this collection of thirty papers originally published in nineteenth-century medical journals and lay publications. Each highlights a specific problem or medical attitude of the period, and together they present an illuminating panorama of the medical profession and of public health in nineteenth-century America. Many of the problems faced by students, practitioners, and patients of the last century are surprisingly similar to those still being encountered today. Dr. Brieger has selected papers that illustrate the issues and developments in medical education, medical practice, surgery, hospitals, hygiene, and psychiatry. They range from Benjamin Rush's "On the Cause of Death in Diseases That Are Not Incurable," to a paper by Robert F. Weir "On the Antiseptic Treatment of Wounds, and Its Results" and an article by Stephen Smith, "New York the Unclean." The final selection, the Announcement of The Johns Hopkins Medical School, stands as a landmark that foretells the beginning of a new era.

Doctoring the South

Doctoring the South PDF

Author: Steven M. Stowe

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011-01-20

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 0807876267

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Offering a new perspective on medical progress in the nineteenth century, Steven M. Stowe provides an in-depth study of the midcentury culture of everyday medicine in the South. Reading deeply in the personal letters, daybooks, diaries, bedside notes, and published writings of doctors, Stowe illuminates an entire world of sickness and remedy, suffering and hope, and the deep ties between medicine and regional culture. In a distinct American region where climate, race and slavery, and assumptions about "southernness" profoundly shaped illness and healing in the lives of ordinary people, Stowe argues that southern doctors inhabited a world of skills, medicines, and ideas about sickness that allowed them to play moral, as well as practical, roles in their communities. Looking closely at medical education, bedside encounters, and medicine's larger social aims, he describes a "country orthodoxy" of local, social medical practice that highly valued the "art" of medicine. While not modern in the sense of laboratory science a century later, this country orthodoxy was in its own way modern, Stowe argues, providing a style of caregiving deeply rooted in individual experience, moral values, and a consciousness of place and time.

American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century

American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century PDF

Author: William G. Rothstein

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 1992-03

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9780801844270

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Paper edition, with a new preface, of a 1972 work. The author, a sociologist, explains how ...19th-century medicine did not disappear; it evolved into modern medicine...; and he discusses such topics as active versus conservative intervention, reciprocity between physicians and the public in adopt

Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press

Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press PDF

Author: Megan Coyer

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1474405614

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In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture, which served as a significant medium for the dissemination and exchange of medical and literary ideas throughout Britain, the colonies, and beyond. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press explores the relationship between the medical culture of Romantic-era Scotland and the periodical press by examining several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood?s Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential and innovative literary periodical of the era.

Medical Malpractice in Nineteenth-century America

Medical Malpractice in Nineteenth-century America PDF

Author: Kenneth De Ville

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1992-04

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0814718485

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It was in the 1840s that Americans first began to sue physicians on a wide scale. The unprecedented wave of litigation that began in this decade disrupted professional relations, injured individual reputations, and burdened physicians with legal fees and damage awards. De Ville's account discusses this outbreak of malpractice litigation with the use of anecdotes.

Doctored

Doctored PDF

Author: Tanya Sheehan

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 027103792X

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"Examines the relationship between photography and medicine in American culture. Focuses on the American Civil War and postbellum Philadelphia to explore how medical models and metaphors helped establish the professional legitimacy of commercial photography while promoting belief in the rehabilitative powers of studio portraiture"--Provided by publisher.

Doctors and the Law

Doctors and the Law PDF

Author: James C. Mohr

Publisher:

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780801853982

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After the American Revolution, the new republic's most prominent physicians envisioned a society in which doctors, lawyers, and the state might work together to ensure public well-being and a high standard of justice. But as James C. Mohr reveals in Doctors and the Law, what appeared to be fertile ground for cooperative civic service soon became a battlefield, as the relationship between doctors and the legal system became increasingly adversarial. Mohr provides a graceful and lucid account of this prfound shift from civic republicanism to marketplace professionalism. He shows how, by 1900, doctors and lawyers were at each other's throats, medical jurisprudence had disappeared as a serious field of study for American physicians, the subject of insanity had become a legal nightmare, expert medical witnesses had become costly and often counterproductive, and an ever-increasing number of malpractice suits had intensified physicians' aversion to the courts. In short, the system we have taken largely for granted throughout the twentieth century had been established. Doctors and the Law is a penetrating look at the origins of our inherited medico-legal system.