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The history of medicine is basically the history of placebos, as most early medical interventions were nothing but placebos, i.e., inert. Over the centuries, doctors started using sham treatments to see whether the clinical improvements were attributable to patients' imagination and/or spontaneous remissions. Today placebos are widely used in clinical research to validate the efficacy of a therapy as well as in clinical practice to please and to placate anxious patients. The placebo effect represents a good example of how a mental activity may affect several physiological functions, thus it is an excellent model to study the mind-body interaction. The nocebo effect, which is opposite to the placebo effect, is also a good model to understand the interaction between mind and body.

This chapter considers the impact of Dr Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808) on Coleridge's thinking about medical subjects. It deals especially with the two medical ‘grand narratives’ to which Beddoes devoted his professional life. The first was the medical system of John Brown, sometimes known as the ‘Brunonian system’. It points out that the Brunonian system existed in two radically versions: a mechanistic, quasi-materialist, British, one; and a transcendental idealist version to which Kant, Fichte, and Schelling all subscribed. It is suggested that Coleridge's awareness of both versions of the doctrine helped him to make the transition to German idealism. Beddoes' second great commitment was to ‘medical mentalism’, the notion that all physiological events lie under the sway of the thinking mind. The differences between Beddoes' views on the mind and those of other physicians are highlighted, as is their influence on Coleridge.

Why, despite often-alleged origins in antiquity, did neurology in Britain endeavour for so long to become a formally recognised specialty within general medicine? To answer this question, this introduction follows a complicated story, one involving individuals, institutions, and ideas all located in the complex, shifting social and cultural ferment of nineteenth and twentieth century Britain.

This chapter offers a historical sketch of the state of practical and theoretical medicine in the 1790s. It starts by considering the range of practitioners offering medical treatments during the eighteenth century and goes on to describe some important but often overlooked differences between our medicine and the medicine of Coleridge's time. It also discusses some of the ramifications of the main theoretical controversies in eighteenth-century medicine: the slow decline of the humoral pathology and rise of the view that disease – possibly all disease – is caused by disturbances in the nervous system; the materialist challenge to vitalism; and the attempt to refound medicine along essentialist philosophical lines.

The origin of medicine is apparent from other ancient texts such as from a document with the ambitious title “The Nature of Man”. One of the texts was dedicated to “falling sickness,” or epilepsy under the title “The Sacred Disease,” including the hitherto valid idea that, judging by the sometimes exceedingly strange course of this illness, it must be something divine, coming from the gods. Falling sickness is an illness whose causes, like those of all other illnesses, lie somewhere in nature. The renunciation of the idea that illness is caused by the numinous powers and of the need to treat illness with magic and invocation makes sense. The author of “The Divine Illness” thought no more or less rationally than those who saw falling sickness as something divine. The observation of the sick individual had not produced any evidence for the new view at any rate. For him, only the belief was lost that the gods, whose existence was responsible for the development of falling sickness. He lost this belief not because he had observed an epileptic, or several epileptics, or even a very large number of them. Something else must have caused the change in his view.

This chapter examines the construction of David Macbeth Moir (1798–1851), a prolific Blackwoodian author and surgeon, as a medical poet, by himself and others, both within Blackwood’s and beyond, as a key component of a redemptive counter-discourse of medical humanism. The idealistic image of the ‘humanistic’ literary medical man is read as developing, in part, as a counter to the negative cultural representations of medicine exacerbated by the anatomy murders as well as the growing divisions between medico-scientific and literary cultures and the perceived negative consequences of the ‘march of intellect’. Moir’s place within a tradition of literary medical men in Scotland and his role in debates surrounding the reform of medical education are discussed, as are key projects, including essays published in Blackwood’s and Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, his Outlines of the Ancient History of Medicine (1831), and his poetry.

In this introductory chapter to the volume Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century, the editors review the utility of "revolution" as an analytic category in the history of science, technology, and medicine, survey the different uses that historical actors have made of the concept of "therapeutic revolution" over the twentieth century, and introduce the common themes and goals of the volume: revisiting the history of therapeutic revolutions in modern medicine.

This introductory chapter defines the intellectual agenda of locating the medical, and explains its significance. It situates the volume as a platform for the traffic of ideas and approaches between the history of medicine as a sub-discipline and South Asian history, more generally. It sets out recent historiographical trajectories, examines the theoretical purchase of historical ontologies (as the methodological inspiration) for this project, and provides a brief outline of chapters in this collection.

Evidence and politics intersect in the delineation of policy about prevention. Historically, prevention has played a prominent role in defining the evidence-based medicine movement and creating evidence-based recommendations. Changes in prevention over time make it likely that prevention recommendations and policies in the future will be subject to more heated attempts to politicize them. Evidence-based recommendations face a variety of challenges that affect their relative immunity to political attack. Important differences exist in the evidence standards applied to prevention compared with treatment and diagnostic services; those differences vary in their justifiability. The December 17, 2009, U.S. Preventive Services Task Force mammography screening recommendations provide an interesting case study of the intrusion of politics into prevention policy; in some respects this intrusion is particular to mammography, and in others it applies to prevention as a whole. Particular factors can be identified that tend to politicize health topics in general. There are specific ways, however, in which the corrupting influences of politics on evidence-based prevention recommendations and policies can be mitigated.

Fears of a post-antibiotic future date back to the very beginning of the antibiotic era. This chapter asks: what can we learn from the history of such expectations? The revolutions claimed in the name of antibiotics and the crises envisioned regarding their usage and enduring utility provide instructive analytical lenses for understanding the history of expectations in science and medicine. The authors begin with a review of the major transformation in medicine ushered in by the advent of the antimicrobial wonder drugs and an examination of the futures claimed in their name. They then proceed to examine two intersecting strands of therapeutic reform (the first beginning in the 1950s, the second not fully taking off until the 1980s) justified by alternate antibiotic dystopias, before proceeding to more general reflections on antibiotics and therapeutic futures, past and present.

This chapter explores the emergence of Britain's first Neurological Society by setting it in sharp contrast to its important specialist counterpart, the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom. While the members of the Ophthalmological Society advocated for a wholly specialist profile, the members of the Neurological Society never aligned themselves with a specialist identity and instead embraced an inclusive attitude and scrupulously cultivated a generalist appearance in order to mitigate any pejorative charge that neurology was a narrow field of enquiry.

Who were the neurologists? Were there any noteworthy developments in their work in the post-1960s? Were they able to maintain their integrative identity with the rise of specialised medicine? Did the neurologists’ unique path to specialisation leave a marked legacy in historiography of neurology? And finally, how might the neurologists’ integrative identity have contributed to the rise of a postmodern culture preoccupied with the brain and the nerves? To begin to answer these questions, it is necessary first to mention a few important trends about neurology and to explore how neurologists’ tendencies to possess and aggrandise an integrative perspective left them with a marked legacy of ambivalence towards specialised knowledge. In turn, that ambivalence created opportunities for workers in other arenas to engage in the construction of the neuroculture that became so evident in the post-1990s.

This chapter provides detailed information on scientist, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), who had an extreme aversion to demons and spirits. He clearly denounced exorcism and looked for healing powers in nature. He forms a trinity with John Brown and Samuel Hahnemann. The three are united by a common attribute that they created the only ideas system in the two-thousand-year history of medicine that arose primarily out of the expressiveness of the organism. John Brown learned about the effects of alcohol and opium, cold baths, and spices through his own experience, and made up his own theory based on those observations. Franz Anton Mesmer worked on magnets. All he knew about them was that they contained, and seemed to emit, invisible natural powers. He concluded that there is an “animal magnetism” and an “animal gravity” and the magnet can influence the organism. Mesmer traveled extensively, appearing as a magician who created wonderful effects with his magnets.

Twentieth- and 21st-century science has been a brilliant success. The ideal doctor of the 20th century, the physician-scientist, is not a success. Contemporary medical care is disappointing to patients and doctors, over-technologized, and expensive. It is time to bring back the clinician whose life is the care of sick patients. The introduction explains in detail why the increasing focus on disease for more than a century, almost to the exclusion of the patient, has led medicine astray. The history of medicine, social changes in society, the rise and dominance of science in all walks of life, and the changes in medical institutions and medical education are all part of the same story. The introduction tells why clinicians are special and why are they are now crucial to revitalizing medical care. This need leads to the reasons for this book and what it has to say.