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The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America

C. Rosenberg

Published 2015 in Perspectives in biology and medicine

ABSTRACT

Medical therapeutics changed in some ways remarkably little in the 2 millennia preceding 1800; by the end of the century, traditional therapeutics had altered fundamentally. This is a significant event not only in the history of medicine, but in social history as well. Yet historians have not only failed to delineate this change in detail, they have hardly begun to place it in a framework of explanation which would relate it to all those other changes which shaped the twentieth-century Western world. Medical historians have always found therapeutics an awkward piece of business. On the whole, they have responded by ignoring it.1 Most historians who have addressed traditional therapeutics have approached it as a source of anecdote, or as a murky bog of routinism from which a comforting path led upward to an ultimately enlightened and scientifically based therapeutics. Isolated incidents such as the introduction of quinine or digitalis seemed only to emphasize the darkness of traditional practice in which they appeared. Among twentieth-century students of medical history, the generally unquestioned criterion for understanding pre-nineteenth-century therapeutics has been physiological, not historical: did a particular practice act in a way that twentiethcentury understanding would regard as efficacious? Did it work? Yet therapeutics is after all a good deal more than a series of pharmacological or surgical experiments. It involves emotions and personal

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