Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine

by Warner, John Harley

• ISBN13: 9780801878213
• ISBN10: 0801878217
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-10-01
• Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV PRESS

Summary

In this wide-ranging exploration of American medical culture, John Harley Warner offers the first in-depth study of a powerful intellectual and social influence: the radical empiricism of the Paris Clinical School. After the French Revolution, Paris emerged as the most vibrant center of Western medicine, bringing fundamental changes in understanding disease and attitudes toward the human body as an object of scientific knowledge. Between the 1810s and the 1860s, hundreds of Americans studied in Parisian hospitals and dissection rooms, and then applied their new knowledge to advance their careers at home and reform American medicine. By reconstructing their experiences and interpretations, by comparing American with English depictions of French medicine, and by showing how American memories of Paris shaped the later reception of German ideals of scientific medicine, Warner reveals that the French impulse was a key ingredient in creating the modern medicine American doctors and patients live with today. Impressed by the opportunity to learn through direct hands-on physical examination and dissection, many American students in Paris began to decry the elaborate theoretical schemes they held responsible for the degraded state of American medicine. These reformers launched an empiricist crusade "against the spirit of system," which promised social, economic, and intellectual uplift for their profession. Using private diaries, family letters, and student notebooks, and exploring regionalism, gender, and class, Warner draws readers into the world of medical Americans while investigating tensions between the physician's identity as scientist and as healer.

Author Biography

John Harley Warner is professor and chair of the history of medicine and science at Yale University, where he is also professor of American studies and history. He is the author of The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, and co-editor (with Janet Tighe) of Major Problems in the History of American Medicine and Public Health.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Note to the Reader	xi
Introduction Storytelling and Professional Culture: American Constructions of the Paris Clinical School	3	(14)
Professional Improvement and the Antebellum Medical Marketplace	17	(15)
Why Paris?	32	(44)
Errand to Paris	76	(57)
Contexts of Transmission: Duty and Distinction	133	(32)
Telling a Historical Story	165	(22)
``They Manage These Things Better in France'': Polity and Reform	187	(36)
``Against the Spirit of System'': Epistemology and Reform	223	(30)
Science, Healing, and the Moral Order of Medicine	253	(38)
Americans and Paris in an Age of German Ascendancy	291	(39)
Remembering Paris	330	(35)
Abbreviations and List of Archives	365	(4)
Notes	369	(76)
Index	445