PMID: 11613446Aug 1, 1996Paper

Making medicine scientific: empiricism, rationality, and quackery in mid-Victorian Britain

Social History of Medicine : the Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine
M W Weatherall

Abstract

This paper discusses the strategies used to construct scientific medicine in mid-Victorian Britain. An opening section considers why it was thought desirable to create a properly scientific medicine, and outlines the empirical and rational bases of the medical establishment's projects for this. The bulk of the paper concerns an alternative approach to making medicine scientific--that put forward by certain advocates of homoeopathy--and how this approach was excluded from those arenas where scientific medicine was being created, and thereby made unscientific. This process is illustrated by the clash between homoeopathy and establishment medicine that occurred in mid-Victorian Cambridge. The final section briefly considers the complementary process of educating the public in what was properly scientific medicine, and what was not, and suggests that the processes of building boundaries to exclude competing practitioners, while keeping patients inside, created the space in which modern scientific medicine has flourished so successfully.

Citations

Mar 3, 2012·Brain : a Journal of Neurology·Mark W Weatherall
Mar 2, 2002·BMJ : British Medical Journal·Gene Feder, Tessa Katz
Jun 19, 2004·Disability and Rehabilitation·Marianne Van Iersel, Graham Mulley
May 4, 2007·International Journal of Laboratory Hematology·I TaraziM Sirdah
Aug 18, 2004·Progress in Neurobiology·Maria ErecinskaIan A Silver
Jul 1, 2013·IEEE Pulse·M E ValentinuzziR O Correa
Apr 15, 2015·Homeopathy : the Journal of the Faculty of Homeopathy·Paolo BellaviteDebora Olioso
Sep 29, 2004·Hospital Medicine·S A Barnard, C K L Cook
May 10, 2018·Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy·Michael SaragaAbraham Fuks

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