Search Results

This chapter details the emergence of a new medicine of the mind in France. The philosophical component of the new medicine was based in large part on the principles of eighteenth-century sensualist philosophy. This tradition held out to the practitioners of mental medicine the presumption of a connection between the body and the mind, which had particular importance for their growing interest in genius. The broad consensus that had existed in the eighteenth century between aesthetics and a philosophy of the mind is mostly lost in the nineteenth century as two opposing models of mental functioning emerge. The powers of observation widely attributed to genius in the eighteenth century were now claimed as the prerogative of (medical) science, and contrasted with imagination, which was predominantly associated with genius and the arts.

Finally, Chapter 7 traces the diminution of audiences as the medical museum ceased to be such a prestigious site for the construction and reception of pathology. In part an epilogue, it traces the largely unknown fate of anatomical pathology in the twentieth century, and the function and fate of collections from their rude health in the inter-war period to the regulatory changes of the twenty-first century, including a contrast between the use of pathological specimens in Gunther von Hagens's Body Worlds and the impact of the Human Tissue Act on (more formal) pathology museums. The conclusion concludes by considering the construction of material abnormality on display and the key features of the pathological specimen.

The problem of designing educational systems to teach methods is complicated by the fact that the kind of knowledge by which physicians know disease and the output of technology is different from and often in conflict with the kind of knowledge by which persons are known. Knowing the history of this conflict, as well as how it is expressed in medical practice is important to educators if students and physicians-in-training are not to be constantly subverted by the lure of “hard data”. Many of the functions people want primary care physicians to perform are contradicted by medical science as it is still taught to students and house officers. Physicians have great difficulty discovering the necessary information about the sick person and entering it into the calculus of their medical judgments so that it has equal weight with information about disease, pathophysiology, and technology.

This chapter discusses the efforts to integrate laboratory analysis into public health as part of a new strategy to eliminate cholera. Bacterial reformers changed the organizational infrastructure of medicine by enlisting the support of private philanthropies, especially the Rockefeller Foundation, to move the laboratory to the center of medical knowledge, promoting a new vision of medical science outside the auspices of public institutions.

This chapter discusses nervous degeneration and its literary representation in the 1890s. Much of the fiction of the 1890s self-consciously engages with the physical and medical sciences to configure the new disease of ‘neurasthenia’, a nervous malady which came to be both casually and symbolically linked to the period. George Gissing's The Whirlpool and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure are novels which situate narratives of nervous breakdown at the problematic intersection of biological theories of determinism and cultural anxieties about the alleged deleterious effects of modern life. The aim of this chapter is to look beyond the particulars of plot and personality which link these books thematically to New Woman fiction in order to reveal the extent of the influence of the biological and physical sciences in creating a culture of unease around the issue of sexual equality.

We discuss the interplay between applied ontology and the use of web resources in scientific and other domains, and provide an account of how ontologies are implemented computationally. We provide an introduction to the Protégé Ontology Editor, the Semantic Web, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). We illustrated how BFO is used to provide the common architecture for specific domain ontologies, including the Ontology for General Medical Science (OGMS), the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO), the Information Artifact Ontology (IAO), and the Emotion Ontology (MFO-EM). Before terms and relations provide the starting point for the creation of definition trees in such ontologies according to the Aristotelian strategy for authoring of definitions outlined in Chapter 4. We conclude with a discussion of the role of a top-level ontology such as BFO in facilitating semantic interoperability.

This chapter examines the discursive forces that competed to define Korean women's bodies and reproductive capacities within the framework of medical science. Reproducing the nation was a top priority for all modernizing countries but was even more pressing under colonial occupation. To emerge victorious and independent, Koreans needed not only numbers but strong, healthy bodies and minds to rebuild the homeland. Critical debates about the modernization of childbirth, birth control, age of marriage, and hygiene opened up a new arena of discourse on sex. While the colonial government sought to improve the quality and quantity of its workforce in the empire, Koreans aimed to create a healthier population to assume control over an independent nation. They also resisted Japanese attempts to colonize the Korean “national body” by maintaining as much control as possible over the public discourse.

Chapter 2 takes up the story in the 1920s where Cannabis Britannica left off. An early media scare about the drug and an example of ham-fisted policing of North African migrant workers in London propelled cannabis into the Poisons Schedule at much the same time as it was inserted into the international drugs regulatory system at Geneva. There remained little domestic consumption of preparations of the plant in the UK in the period before the Second World War save among the itinerant workers of the imperial ports. There was certainly limited medical application of substances containing the drug, which was omitted from the British Pharmacopoeia in 1932. However, in these years the control regime was being carefully assembled. Ambitious bureaucrats at the recently established Home Office Drugs Branch primed police forces around the country to be on the lookout for cannabis, even where few were ever likely to encounter the drug.

The internal equivalence of humans provides the foundation for medical science, and social inclusiveness is the foundation for effective care systems. Solidarity created state care systems, and their shortcomings are largely attributable to a lack of it. Consumerism stands opposed to this, with every man for each other as its philosophy. Public belief in solidarity, at least for health care in the UK, has so far generally withstood almost three decades of sustained assault from those with the power to form public opinion. Assumptions that solidarity is natural to the declining industrial working class but not to the rising middle class are illusory. Neither justice nor solidarity were ever natural, they had to be built through experience and struggle by those with most to gain from them and least to lose. Most of the so-called middle class appeared to be the working class in new conditions.

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.

This chapter documents the efforts of the nineteenth-century medical community in the search for better cures and means of treatment for patients suffering from loathsome diseases. Fuzzy professional ethics and ambiguous public sentiment came to guide physicians in their slow march toward modern therapeutics. The less risky approach of simply letting nature take its course collided with a growing desire to test new drugs at the bedside. Thus the chapter recounts the advances made in medical sciences in the slow march toward modern therapeutics, and also discusses the drawbacks of scientific research during this period. In their quest for new knowledge about disease, nineteenth-century physicians even periodically resorted to human experimentation.

This chapter suggests evidence that there is logic to the idea of the fragmentation of healthcare consumers. There is an evident move from a position in which consumers were characterised as passive and compliant, accepting the authority not only of medical science but also of the professional as decision maker. Expectations of the service encounter vary from compliant acceptance of both medical science and authority, to the active challenging of medical science as a paradigm and the medical professional as decision maker. The challenge lies in balancing the competing, and occasionally contradictory, perspectives of all the parties involved within a context in which the consumerist discourse has gained primacy. Given this trajectory of evolution, the retention of a unitary ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of service provision would seem unlikely to be effective in meeting these expectations and in ensuring consumer satisfaction.

This chapter outlines the parameters of the neoliberal risk culture in which the message that “breast is best” circulates. Here efforts to control the future, and specifically to prevent negative events from taking place, serve as an organizing principle of human behavior, and various forms of scientific expertise exercise far-ranging technical and moral authority over the choices people make. People look constantly to doctors, toxicologists, psychologists, financial planners, and other risk analysts to make everyday decisions about how to eat, breathe, raise children, improve relationships, manage money, and the like. Concerns about risk, especially about health and threats to the body, are widespread, and information about diet and disease pervade public discourse. Life is medicalized, or cast as a body project that requires the continuous monitoring and judgment of medical science, and health becomes a defining characteristic of responsible selfhood and citizenship.

The introduction starts by defining the theoretical framework in the context of recent and current debates on ‘multiple modernities’, which often fail to include Latin America. This section then moves on to discuss the relevance of and relation between key categories, primarily those of ‘civilisation’ and ‘decadence’ − which were increasingly used in association with each other − with respect to the more recent notion of degeneration which provided them with a scientific analytical foundation. In the late nineteenth-century, many started to feel that ‘modern civilisation’ carried within itself the danger of deviance, especially as the medical model of social analysis became established. I discuss here how these debates culminated in the years between the mid-1890s and the early 1900s, when the process of nation-building and economic prosperity reached its peak in the Southern Cone as the rapid changes that had taken place during the previous two decades became consolidated. Among the main consequences were the growth of the urban population and the consequent rise of the so-called ‘social question’. It was during this time that the need to rethink how the idea of civilisation should be approached acquired for the first time such huge prominence in Latin America.