A Respectable Occupation: - University of Hertfordshire Research ...

the theory they had learned, with practical observations on the wards. Also
at this time, it was becoming accepted that there was a core of knowledge
applicable to physicians, surgeons and apothecaries. 46 Practitioners were
attempting to understand the working of the human body by observing
symptoms and then acting accordingly. 47 This philosophy had been
pioneered in Paris and Leiden in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Generally, there was a change from employing medicines
described in classical texts and from ideas of humours and of individual
diagnosis, to an adoption of the concept of relating disease to the body's
organs and tissues. The hospitals, offering as they did a collection of
patients with a variety of illnesses, gave physicians and students the
opportunity to observe and experiment. 48 Waddington believes that this
change was initiated by the surgeons rather than the physicians. The
surgeons relied more on the observation of illness and this related closely to
the trend towards an approach based on anatomy and pathology. 49
46 S.C. Lawrence, „Science and Medicine at the London Hospitals: Development of Teaching and
Research, 1750-1815‟ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1985) pp. 171, 179, 411-2 quoted
in Digby Making a Medical Living, p. 55, note 59. See also K. Waddington, Medical Education at St
Bartholomew’s Hospital, p. 6.
47 R. Maulitz, Morbid Appearances: The Anatomy of Pathology in the Early Nineteenth Century (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) quoted in S. Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge, p. 14, note 29.
48 R. Shryock, The Development of Modern Medicine: an interpretation of the social and scientific factors
involved (Madison, 1974), 151; Ivan Waddington, “The Role of the Hospital in the Development of
Modern Medicine: A Sociological Analysis”, Sociology 7, (1973): 211-5; Charles Rosenberg, The Care of
Strangers: the rise of America's hospital system (New York, 1987), 82-5; See also; Malcolm Nicolson,
“The Introduction of Percussion and Stethoscopy to Early- Nineteenth Century Edinburgh," in Medicine
and the Five Senses, William Bynum and Roy Porter, ed. (Cambridge, 1993), 134-5; Fissell, Patients,
Power and the Poor; Risse, Hospital Life; John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Prospective: Medical
Practice, Knowledge and Identity in America1820-1885 (Harvard University Press, 1986) quoted in S.
Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge, p.13, note 25: See also K. Waddington, Medical Education at St
Bartholomew’s Hospital, p 27.
49 S. Lawrence, „Educating the Senses: students, teachers and medical rhetoric in eighteenth century
London‟ ed. W. Bynum and R. Porter (Cambridge, 1993) quoted in Waddington, Medical Education at St
Bartholomew’s Hospital, pp. 26-27, note 45.
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