Abstract
If any topic is privileged in the history of nineteenth-century medicine it is the germ theory and the supposed revolution in surgical practice which was its result. Many historians write of sanitarian and miasmatic conceptualisations of disease and health-care practice as being replaced around the turn of the century by the truths of a body of medical knowledge produced by the scientific method rather than by an earlier empiricism. In A. J. Youngson’s story of progress, The Scientific Revolution in Victorian Medicine, for example, miasmatists simply misunderstood disease or did not understand it at all: ‘They showed good sense; although it cannot be said that they possessed good science.’1 In such accounts, a pre-existing ‘reality’ of germs and all that went with them is constructed as being uncovered, or discovered, by an increasingly ‘true’ medical science. When one turns to critical studies of thought on germs, dirt and pollution, studies which suggest that science and culture actively produce rather than simply reveal the object of study, or ‘nature’, the paradigm-shifting revolution based on knowledge of germs is still there. Mary Douglas writes:
[O]ur idea of dirt is dominated by the knowledge of pathogenic organisms. The bacterial transmission of disease was a great nineteenth-century discovery. It produced the most radical revolution in the history of medicine. So much has it transformed our lives that it is difficult to think of dirt except in the context of pathogenicity.2
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Notes and References
A. J. Youngson, The Scientific Revolution in Victorian Medicine, Croom Helm, London, 1979, p. 23. See also the work of Frederick F. Cartwright, who writes that what ‘produce[d] a revolution in medical thinking and practice were the “cell theory” and the “germ theory”_[which] must be accorded the first place in changing medicine from an empirical art into a science’.
F. F. Cartwright, A Social History of Medicine, Longman, London and New York, 1977, pp. 149–50.
M. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 36; See also G. Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness, pp. 202–14; D. Lupton, The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body, Sage, London, 1995, pp. 36–7.
F. F. Cartwright, ‘Antiseptic Surgery’, pp. 90–1; F. F. Cartwright, The Development of Modem Surgery, Arthur Barker, London, 1967, p. 56, p. 78.
T. H. Pennington, ‘Listerism, its Decline and its Persistence: The introduction of aseptic surgical techniques in three British teaching hospitals, 1890–99’, Medical History, 39, 1995, pp. 35–60.
C. McBurney, ‘The Technic of Aseptic Surgery’ in A. P. Gould and J. C.Warren (eds), The International Text Book of Surgery, London and Philadelphia, WB Saunders, 1902, p. 270.
A. Thomson and A. Miles, A Manual of Surgery, Young J. Pentland, Edinburgh and London, 1906, p. 10 [original emphasis].
For new developments towards what has come to be known as ‘scientific medicine’ in the late nineteenth century, see R. E. Kohler, ‘Medical Reform and Biomedical Science — a Case Study’, and R. C. Maulitz, ‘“Physician versus Bacteriologist”: The Ideology of Science in Clinical Medicine’, in M. J. Vogel and C. E. Rosenberg (eds), The Therapeutic Revolution, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1979, pp. 27–66, 91–107.
J. C. Da Costa, Modem Surgery: General and Operative, W.B. Saunders, London, 1900, p. 17. H.A. Thomson and A. Miles, A Manual of Surgery, p. 10.
W. Playfair, A Treatise on the Science and Practice of Midwifery, Smith Elder & Co., London, 9th edn, 1898, pp. 365, 374.
C. Lawrence and R. Dixey, ‘Practising on Principle: Joseph Lister and the Germ Theory of Disease’, in C. Lawrence (ed.), Medical Theory, Surgical Practice, Routledge, London and New York, 1992, p. 154.
C. Lawrence and R. Dixey, ‘Practising on Principle’, p. 153; See also L. Granshaw, ‘ “Upon this principle I have based a practice”: the development and reception of antisepsis in Britain, 1867–1890’, in J. Pickstone (ed.), Medical Innovations in Historical Perspective, Macmillan, London, 1992.
See for example, E. Lűckes, Lectures on General Nursing; C. Wood, A Handbook of Nursing for Hospital and Home, Cassell & Co., London and Melbourne, n.d. (189?); E. C. Laurence, Modem Nursing in Hospital and Home, Scientific Press, London, 1907.
C. E. Rosenberg, ‘The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 20, 1977, pp. 485–506.
G. B. Burbidge, Lectures for Nurses, Australasian Medical Publishing, Glebe, 1935, p. 63; See also E. C. Laurence, Modern Nursing, pp. 67–9.
R. Strong, ‘Hygiene of the Sick-Room’ in H. Morten (ed.), A Complete System of Nursing written by Medical Men and Nurses, Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., London, 1903, p. 4.
A. Miles, Surgical Ward Work and Nursing, Scientific Press, London, 1899.
I. Stewart and H. Cuff, Practical Nursing, William Blackwood, Edinburgh and London, 1903, p. 350.
H. W. G. Macleod, Hygiene for Nurses, Smith Elder, London, 1911.
See for example, A. Munro, The Science and Art of Nursing the Sick; E. J. Domville, A Manual for Hospital Nurses, J. & A. Churchill, London, 1878; H. Morten (ed.), A Complete System for Nursing;
W. J. Hadley, Nursing: General, Medical and Surgical, J. & A. Churchill, London, 1902.
A. C. Abbott, The Principles of Bacteriology, H. K. Lewis, London, 1902.
For discussion of ‘methods of purification’, meaning sterilisation, see F. F. Burchard, ‘A Discussion on the Present Position of the Aseptic Treatment of Wounds’, BMJ, II, 1904, p. 795.
F.F. Burchard, ‘A Discussion on the Present Position of the Aseptic Treatment of Wounds’, BMJ, II, 1904, p. 797
N. J. Fox, ‘Scientific Theory Choice and Social Structure: The Case of Joseph Lister’s Antisepsis, Humoral Theory and Asepsis’, History of Science, 26, 1988, p. 391.
C. Leedham-Green, ‘A Bacteriological Inquiry into the Relative Value of Various Agents Used in the Disinfection of the Hands’, BMJ, II, 1896, p. 1109.
C. Yelverton Pearson, ‘Observations on Sterilization of the Hands’, BMJ, II, 1905, p. 785 [original emphasis]. For other examples of such methods and experiments,
see C. B. Lockwood, ‘Further Report on Aseptic and Septic Surgical Cases’, BMJ, II, 1896, pp. 59–62;
J. R. Collins, ‘Bacteriological Inquiry into the Sterilization of Hands’, BMJ, I, 1904, pp. 1364–66.
R. Howard, The House Surgeon’s Vade Mecum, Edward Arnold, London, 1911, p. 5.
J. R. Collins, ‘An Experimental Inquiry into the Infection of Operative Wounds, from the skin, the breath, and the air’, BMJ, II, 1905, pp. 121–5.
See for example, R. G. Richardson, The Surgeon’s Tale, Charles Scrib-ners, New York, 1958, pp. 32–37;
D. de Moulin, A History of Surgery, Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 1988, pp. 294–95; F. F. Cartwright, ‘Antiseptic Surgery’, p. 88.
See Dr Snow Beck, ‘On a Case of Puerperal Fever’, The Lancet, II, 1867, pp. 805–6; F. Churchill, On the Theory and Practice of Midwifery, p. 676; K. Codell Carter, ‘Ignaz Semmelweis, Carl Mayrhofer, and the Rise of Germ Theory’, p. 46.
J. Randers-Pehrson, The Surgeon’s Glove, Garles C. Thomas, Springfield, 1960, pp. 2–3.
K. W. Monarrat, Surgical Technics in Hospital Practice, John Wright & Co., Bristol, 1898, pp. 7–10.
F. Treves, ‘The Surgeon in the Nineteenth Century’, The Lancet, II, 1900, p. 316.
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© 1998 Alison Bashford
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Bashford, A. (1998). Sterile Bodies: Germs and the Gendered Practitioner. In: Purity and Pollution. Studies in Gender History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501249_7
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