Doctors: The Biography of Medicine
By 1932, the historian Henry E. Sigerist had noted that medicine’s systemizing impulses were “no longer concerned with man but with disease,” as Anderson and Mackay point out.
Meghan O'Rourke • The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
‘The art has three factors, the disease, the patient, the physician,’ wrote Hippocrates,
Roy Porter • The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (The Norton History of Science)
As scientific knowledge and technology advanced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what it meant to be a doctor changed. Michel Foucault’s insight about this change is well summarized by psychiatrist and medical historian Abraham Nussbaum: Foucault described the moment when physicians combined dissection with clinical practice as
... See moreSuzanne Koven • Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life
Post-Vesalian investigations dramatically advanced knowledge of the structures and functions of the living organism.