Modern Medicine and the Sciences

This chapter retraces the history of the “great scientific advancements” from virology to immunology, physiology to endocrinology and bacteriology to genetics, which constitute the main events in the triumphant myth of modern medicine. Modern medicine birthed an epistemological revolution: doctors began justifying the efficacy of their treatments on the grounds of biological explanations. The chapter seeks to clarify the scientific concerns that led a generation of historians to recharacterize this history, which enshrined the fundamental connection between medicine and science, as “Whiggish” and teleological. Physiology was poised to become the scientific basis for the practice of medicine. The development of microbiology and its uncontested achievements demonstrate the merits of a medical praxis grounded on experimental laboratory research, which only sometimes maintains very indirect links to the clinic. The chapter argues that, in medicine, analysis of the social contingencies that inform medical knowledge is not in opposition to the history of medical rationality.