By Stephanie P. Browner
In 1847, on the first assembly of the yankee scientific organization, the newly elected president reminded his brethren that the career, "once venerated," not earned homage "spontaneously and universally." The clinical market used to be crowded and aggressive; nation legislation regulating clinical perform have been repealed; practitioners have been usually branded via their lay rivals as aristocrats bent on developing a wellbeing and fitness care monopoly. through 1900, the battles have been over, and, because the president of AMA had was hoping, medical professionals have been now generally honored as males of profound technological know-how, based literature, well mannered accomplishments, and advantage. in reality, via 1900 the health care provider had changed the minister because the such a lot esteemed expert within the usa; ailment loomed higher than damnation; and technology promised to regulate the discord, ameliorations, and excesses that democracy appeared to license.
In Profound technology and stylish Literature, Stephanie Browner charts this trajectory—and demonstrates whilst that medicine's claims to somatic services and managerial expertise didn't pass uncontested. whilst elite physicians based associations that made expert medicine's authority noticeable and bonafide, many others frightened concerning the violence that may attend medicine's force to mastery and science's equation of rational disinterest with white, informed masculinity. analyzing fiction through quite a lot of authors beside and opposed to clinical texts, Browner appears to the ways that writers reminiscent of Hawthorne, Melville, Holmes, James, Chesnutt, and Jewett inventoried the collateral harm that would be performed as technological know-how put in its abnormal knowing of the body.
A paintings of awesome interdisciplinary achieve, Profound technological know-how and stylish Literature records either the intense upward push drugs within the usa and the classy valuable to make the physique significant that led many American writers to withstand the medicalized physique.
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Additional resources for Profound Science and Elegant Literature: Imagining Doctors in Nineteenth-Century America
Sample text
Invoking the myths of American originality, freedom from narrow training, and bold disregard for conventions, Bigelow proclaims that the United States will produce the next generation of leaders in science. The inventor, according to Bigelow, displays a willingness to reject accepted wisdom, an almost bullheaded tenacity and perseverance, and an intuitive confidence in his own ideas. Bigelow intones the names of 22 Chapter 1 the nation's great inventors-Franklin, Fulton, and Whitney-and adds Morton to the list.
Franklin was a reformer; Fulton a warm advocate of the principles of free trade; while Whitney ... anticipated the decline and overthrow of all arbitrary governments, and the substitution in their place of a purely representative system like our own. (1 7) Bifocals, steamboats, and cotton gins; reform, capitalism and democracy; these are the fruits of that "uncultivated gift"-American ingenuity (18). Ether, Bigelow suggests, is another. In twenty-seven pages, he constructs a history of discoveries and inventions from Jenner to Leverrier, from Galvani to Schonbein, that ends in Boston with a common dentist.
Leadership in science will be a natural consequence of the nation's political and economic structures. S. S. political and economic systems enjoy, Bigelow notes that genius in science is often linked to genius in the political sphere. Central to Bigelow's hagiographies of Franklin, Fulton, and Whitney as scientists are their political contributions. Franklin was a reformer; Fulton a warm advocate of the principles of free trade; while Whitney ... anticipated the decline and overthrow of all arbitrary governments, and the substitution in their place of a purely representative system like our own.