The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820-1885 - Hardcover

Warner, John Harley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674883306 ISBN 13: 9780674883307

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1987

Synopsis

This new paperback edition makes available John Harley Warner's highly influential, revisionary history of nineteenth-century American medicine. Deftly integrating social and intellectual perspectives, Warner explores a crucial shift in medical history, when physicians no longer took for granted such established therapies as bloodletting, alcohol, and opium and began to question the sources and character of their therapeutic knowledge. He examines what this transformation meant in terms of patient care and assesses the impact of clinical research, educational reform, unorthodox medical movements, newly imported European method, and the products of laboratory science on medical ideology and action.

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Reviews

Warner defines therapeutics as both "a cognitive system and a set of social practices," and, in exploring the development of medical therapeutics in 19th-century America, he assesses the social and intellectual context. He sets himself the difficult task of assessing what physicians were actually doing to their patients and the efficacy of patient care. He uses the case records for the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Cincinnati Commercial Hospital, and considers how the Paris Clinical School and the empiricism/rationalism debate influenced patient care in America. This is a very thorough, scholarly work, using much primary source material. It belongs in all history of science and medicine collections. Frances Groen, McGill Univ. Medical Lib., Montreal
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674883306
• ISBN 13: 9780674883307
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 376