Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Why care about the history of medicine?
- I Ideas as actors
- 1 The therapeutic revolution: Medicine, meaning, and social change in nineteenth-century America
- 2 Medical text and social context: Explaining William Buchan's Domestic Medicine
- 3 John Gunn: Everyman's physician
- 4 Body and mind in nineteenth-century medicine: Some clinical origins of the neurosis construct
- 5 Florence Nightingale on contagion: The hospital as moral universe
- 6 Cholera in nineteenth-century Europe: A tool for social and economic analysis
- II Institutions and medical care
- III The past in the present: Using medical history
- Index
1 - The therapeutic revolution: Medicine, meaning, and social change in nineteenth-century America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Why care about the history of medicine?
- I Ideas as actors
- 1 The therapeutic revolution: Medicine, meaning, and social change in nineteenth-century America
- 2 Medical text and social context: Explaining William Buchan's Domestic Medicine
- 3 John Gunn: Everyman's physician
- 4 Body and mind in nineteenth-century medicine: Some clinical origins of the neurosis construct
- 5 Florence Nightingale on contagion: The hospital as moral universe
- 6 Cholera in nineteenth-century Europe: A tool for social and economic analysis
- II Institutions and medical care
- III The past in the present: Using medical history
- Index
Summary
Therapeutics has always been central to medical practice, but not to the practice of the profession's historians. My first teacher, Erwin H. Ackerknecht, once wryly cited by way of explanation the German saying that one should not mention rope in the house of the hanged; little glory was to be harvested from the annals of pre-twentieth-century therapeutics. It was more an occasion of embarrassment than of pride, largely ignored by historians except as a source of anecdote and as counterpoint to the laudable accumulation of effective knowledge in more recent generations.
I too could make little sense of traditional therapeutics when I first began to study medical history. Those of my teachers and contemporaries willing to take the older healing tradition seriously saw the physician's role as essentially consolatory and psychological; past therapeutic practices could then be construed as a mixture of ritual and placebo. Little serious attention was paid to the actual drugs and procedures that made up the content of practice – the cathartics, emetics, diuretics, bleeding, and the like – and to the way in which they were understood by patients, families, and practitioners.
Only gradually did the system begin to seem coherent – to seem in fact to be a system of social relations and shared conceptual frameworks. The ideas of both physician and patient had to be taken seriously, even if they seemed arbitrary and irrational in twentieth-century terms, in terms that is of measurable physiological efficacy.
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- Explaining Epidemics , pp. 9 - 31Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992
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