Abstract
In 1963, Michel Foucault concluded The Birth of the Clinic:
In the last years of the eighteenth century, European culture outlined a structure that has not yet been unraveled [sic]; we are only just beginning to disentangle a few of the threads, which are still so unknown to us that we immediately assume them to be either marvellously new or absolutely archaic, whereas for two hundred years (not less, yet not much more) they have constituted the dark, but firm web of our experience.1
Over the quarter of the century since 1963, many scholars inside and outside the history and philosophy of science and medicine have contributed to the archaeology of that ‘dark but firm web’ — the organisation of our modern ‘objectivity’. Foucault’s own largely ‘internalist’ history of ideas has been surpassed by scholars seeking to unravel and elaborate the subtle and complex relations between the rise of ‘positivist’ or ‘scientific’ medicine, on the one hand, and the concurrent growth of the social structures and relations peculiar to urban industrial capitalism, on the other. Research of this kind is still in progress.2
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Notes
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. An archaeology of medical perception, trs. A.M. Sheridan (London, 1976), p. 199.
See Karl Figlio, ‘The Historiography of Scientific Medicine’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 19 (1977), pp. 262–86. For more recent work, see Peter Wright and Andrew Treacher (eds), The Problem of Medical Knowledge: examining the social construction of medicine (Edinburgh, 1982).
For the classic expression and helpful bibliography, see Bob Young, ‘Science is Social Relations’, Radical Science Journal, No.5 (1977), pp. 65–129. For a lucid critique of positivism, see also T. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), esp. pp. 5–8, 40–52.
Max Neuburger, The History of the Doctrine of the Healing Power of Nature (Stuttgart, 1926; English trs., New York, 1942).
Darwin, ‘Preface’, Zoonomia (London, 1794), n.p.
Cf. N.D. Jewson, ‘The Disappearance of the Sick-Man from Medical Cosmology, 1770–1870’, Sociology, 10 (1976), pp. 225–44.
See John Goodwyn Barmby, ‘Societarian Views on the Medical and Surgical Professions’, New Moral World, 9 (1841), pp. 187–8, 235–6, 395–7.
See, for example, Fair Play: being an examination of the rival claims of homoeopathy and the chartered schools of medicine and surgery. By a Barrister (London, 1863), p. 27; and Samuel Cockburn, An Exposition of the Homoeopathic Law; with a refutation of some of the chief objections (London, 1860), p. 3.
James Lomax Bardsley, Observations on Homoeopathy and Animal Magnetism … a lecture introductory to a course on the practice of medicine, delivered at the Royal School of Medicine and Surgery, Pine St., Manchester, October 3, 1838 (Manchester, 1838), p. 5.
On Wesley’s Primitive Physich, see G.S. Rousseau, ‘John Wesley’s “Primitive Physick”’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 16 (1968), pp. 242–56; A.W. Hill, John Wesley Among the Physicians (London, 1958); and C.W. Callaway, ‘John Wesley’s “Primitive Physick”’, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 49 (1974), pp. 318–24. For Buchan, see C.J. Lawrence, ‘William Buchan: Medicine Laid Open’, Medical History, 19 (1975), pp. 20–35; and Charles Rosenberg, ‘Medical Text and Social Context: explaining William Buchan’s “Domestic Medicine”’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 57 (1983), pp. 22–42.
Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. 3: Organics (London, 1970), pp. 202–7.
Van Helmont, Oriatrike, or physick refined, trs. J.S. Sometime (London, 1662); see also, T.S. Patterson, ‘Van Helmont’s Ice and Water Experiments’, Annals of Science, 1 (1936), pp. 462–67.
See, New Age, or Concordian Gazette, 1 (1844), p. 155.
John Pearson, A Plain and Rational Account of the Nature and Effects of Animal Magnetism (London, 1790), pp. 11–12. For discussion of ‘crisis’ in hydropathy and for further sources, see the chapter in this volume by Kelvin Rees.
On the latter, see Steven Shapin, ‘Social Uses of Science’, in G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds), The Ferment of Knowledge: studies in the historiography of eighteenth century science (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 122–3.
See, for example, William Sharp MD, Organopathy: or Medical Progress. An essay (London, 1867); and William Morgan MD, The Philosophy of Homoeopathy (London, 1864).
Jacob Dixon, Investigations into the Primary Laws Which Determine and Regulate Health and Disease (London, 1856).
Dickson, Fallacies of the Faculty with the Chrono-thermal Principles of Medicine (London, 1839), as quoted in Dickson, Memorable Events in the Life of a London Physician (London, 1863), p. 84.
Ibid., p. 43.
Walter Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont: reformer of science and medicine (Cambridge, 1982), p. 208.
On Pascal, see Lucien Goldman, The Hidden God, trs. P. Thody (London, 1977); on Schelling, see Joseph L. Esposito, Schelling’s Idealism and Philosophy of Nature (Lewisburg, 1977); on Hegel, see S. Sambursky, ‘Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature’, in Y. Elkana (ed.), The Interaction Between Science and Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1974), pp. 143–54, and Dietrich von Engelhardt, ‘Hegel’s Philosophical Understanding of Illness’, in R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds), Hegel and the Sciences (Dordrecht/Boston, 1984), pp. 123–41; for a succinct account of Marx and Engels’ regard of dialectics, see Engels, Anti-Dühring (London, 1894), and E.V. Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic, essays on its history and theory, trs. H. Campbell Creighton (Moscow, 1977); on Swedenborg, see George Trobridge, Swedenborg, life and teaching (New York, 1976), and the postscript to E.P. Thompson, ‘London’, in Michael Phillips (ed.), Interpreting Blake (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 5–31; on Blake, see also Donald D. Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake’s reponse to Newton (Chicago, 1974).
Claude Lévi Strauss, Anthropologia Structurale (Paris, 1958), pp. 133ff, 147ff, cited in G.E.R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy. Two types of argumentation in early Greek thought (Cambridge, 1971), p. 31.
T.M. Brown, ‘From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth Century English Physiology’, Journal for the History of Biology, 7 (1974), pp. 179–216; see also Shapin (note 15), p. 116ff.
J.V. Pickstone, ‘Establishment and Dissent in Nineteenth Century Medicine’, in W.J. Sheils (ed.), The Church and Healing (Oxford, 1982), p. 169. See also, F. Schiller, ‘Reverend Wesley, Doctor Marat and their Electric Fire’, Clio Medica, 15 (1981), pp. 159–76.
See, John Millar, ‘The Theories of Dr. Cullen and Dr. Brown’, in his Observations on the Change of Public Opinion, in religion, politics, and medicine (London, 1802), vol.1, pp. 141–63; G. Risse, ‘The Brownian System of Medicine: its theoretical and practical implications’, Clio Medica, 5 (1970), pp. 45–51; idem, ‘Schelling, “Naturphilosophie” and John Brown’s System of Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 50 (1976), pp. 321–34; further sources are given in von Engelhardt (note 21).
Owsei Temkin, ‘Wunderlich, Schelling and the History of Medicine’, in his The Double Face of Janus (Baltimore/London, 1977), p. 251.
For example, J. Russell Reynolds (the future president of the Royal College of Physicians), On the Relation of Practical Medicine to Philosophical Method, and Popular Opinion: being the annual oration, delivered before the North London Medical Society, on February 10th, 1858 (London, 1858).
Baas, Outlines of the History of Medicine and the Medical Profession (1889; English reprint, New York, 1971), p. 629.
Gilbert Durand, On the Disfiguration of the Image of Man in the West, trs. J.A. Pratt (Ipswich, 1977), p. 6.
Cited in Christopher Lawrence, ‘The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin (eds), Natural Order: historical studies of scientific culture (Beverly Hills/London, 1979), p. 26.
Cf. D. Armstrong, ‘The Patient’s View’, Sociology of Science and Medicine, 18 (1984), pp. 737–44.
‘I say, without the interposition of any such unintelligible influence, I can easily conceive how extraordinary cures may be performed by the mechanical effects of simple water upon the human body.’ Smollett, An Essay on the External Use of Water (London, 1752), p. 3.
Hahnemann, ‘The Medicine of Experience (1805)’, reprinted in J.J. Drysdale and J. Rutherford, An Introduction to the Study of Homoeopathy (London, 1845), p. 75.
Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking, 1976), pp. 26ff.
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Cooter, R. (1988). Alternative Medicine, Alternative Cosmology. In: Cooter, R. (eds) Studies in the History of Alternative Medicine. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19606-7_4
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