Description
Book SynopsisThis 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,
Trade ReviewWinner of the 1991 William H. Welch Medal, American Association for the History of Medicine "Combining a prodigiously researched and thoroughly fascinating depiction of actual nineteenth-century therapy with a sophisticated and widely applicable model of scientific change, The Therapeutic Perspective is a superb book, likely to become a classic in the literature of medical history."--Martin S. Pernick, Science "Warner tells his story in powerful and lucid ... prose... [He] has written an important and radical book."--Steven Shapin, The Times Higher Education Supplement "[The Therapeutic Perspective] is a clearly written and well-organized analytic study that should bring much credit to its author, for he has made far more understandable an important aspect of our history."--Gert H. Brieger, M.D., Journal of the American Medical Association "[Warner] pursues a sophisticated argument with extraordinary diligence, thus producing a carefully crafted book... Judged by its methodology, insights, presentation, and prose, this book ranks as a model of American scholarship."--Dora B. Weiner, Social History of Medicine
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Therapeutics and the Transformation of American Medicine1Pt. IAntebellum Medical Therapeutics1Intervention and identity112Epistemology, Social Change, and the Reorganization of Knowledge373The Principle of Specificity58Pt. IIThe Process of Change4Therapeutic Change835Attitudes toward Change1626Attitudes toward Foreign Knowledge1857The Arbitration of Change207Pt. IIITherapeutic Reconstruction8Physiological Therapeutics and the Dissipation of Therapeutic Gloom2359Cui Bono?258Abbreviations285Notes289A Note on Sources for the History of Therapeutics345Index353
