In Victorian Britain scientific medicine encompassed an array of activities, from laboratory research and the use of medical technologies through the implementation of sanitary measures that drained canals and prevented the adulteration of milk and bread. Although most practitioners supported scientific medicine, controversies arose over where decisions should be made, in the laboratory or in the clinic, and by whommedical practitioners or research scientists. In this study, Terrie Romano uses the life and eclectic career of Sir John Burdon Sanderson (1829-1905) to explore the Victorian campaign to make medicine scientific. Sanderson, in many ways a prototypical Victorian, began his professional work as a medical practitioner and Medical Officer of Health in London, then became a pathologist and physiologist and eventually the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford. His career illustrates the widespread support during this era for a medicine based on science. In Making Medicine Scientific, Romano argues this support was fueled by the optimism characteristic of the Victorian age, when the application of scientific methods to a range of social problems was expected to achieve progress. Dirt and disease as well as the material culture of experimentation from frogs to photographsrepresent the tangible context in which Sanderson lived and worked. Romano's detailed portrayal reveals a fascinating figure who embodied the untidy nature of the Victorian age's shift from an intellectual system rooted in religion to one based on science.
Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction
PART I: From Evangelical to Medical Officer of Health ONE: Choosing Medicine TWO: Medical Officer of Health
PART II: Making a Career in Medical Research THREE: Before the Germ Theory: The Cattle Plague of 1865-1866 and the State Support of Pathology FOUR: From Clinician-Researcher to Professional Physiologist: Making the Pulse Visible FIVE: Becoming a Research Pathologist: The Rise of Laboratory Medicine in Britain SIX: Focusing on Physiology: Capturing the Venus's-Flytrap's Electrical Activity
PART II: The Medical Sciences: Critics and Allies SEVEN: Physicians, Anti vivisectionists, and the Failure of the Oxford School of Physiology EIGHT: A Corner Turned? Experimental Medicine in Late Victorian Britain
List of Abbreviations Appendix: Researchers Associated with Burdon Sanderson in Britain Notes Index
""Making Medicine Scientific is a carefully researched and written work... It enlares our view of the power-struggle for autonomy over medicine by both doctors at the bedside and scientists in the laboratory and extends the picture of the relationship between science and medicine in the late nineteenth century.""
