'A Plea for the Lancet: Bloodletting, Therapeutic Epistemology, and Professional Identity in Late Nineteenth-century American Medicine

Despite the declining use of bloodletting, American physicians vigorously debated its therapeutic value throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century. This debate was a terrain upon which physicians expressed deeply held ideas about professional identity and clinical epistemology. Many bloodletting proponents saw its continued defence as a way of affirming the superiority of mainstream physicians over irregular practitioners as well as the epistemological priority of clinical experience over laboratory knowledge; others sought to reconcile the practice of bloodletting with the latest physiological and bacteriological discoveries. This paper contributes to historians’ ongoing reassessment of what it meant for medicine to become ‘scientific’ at the turn of the twentieth century. ‘Scientific medicine’ encompassed not only the search for new remedies and research practices, but also the attempt to put older therapies like bloodletting on a sound footing for the future.

Source: Social History of Medicine - December 7, 2016 Category: History of Medicine Authors: Anders, E. O. Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research