Whooley, Owen (Author)
Over the course of the nineteenth century, orthodox physicians in the U.S. experienced dramatic shifts in their professional standing. Concurrently, the epistemological foundation of medicine underwent tremendous change, as numerous medical sects offered competing visions of medical knowledge. This dissertation explores the interrelationship between professional and epistemological change in 19th century American medicine by introducing the concept of an epistemic contest. An epistemic contest is one in which actors, advocating competing understandings of reality and the nature of knowledge, struggle to achieve recognition for their approach to knowledge and, in turn, capture societal investment for their intellectual program. Through the case study of cholera, this dissertation reconstructs the history of the disease as a contested object of intellectual scrutiny so as to 1) identify the diverse practices and strategies employed by medical sects in the epistemic contest over medicine and 2) to identify the means by which orthodoxy achieved epistemic closure and gained professional recognition for the bacteriological model of disease. Alternative medical movements like Homeopathy drew on cholera to force orthodoxy to give an epistemological account of its knowledge and to successfully advocate for inclusion in state institutions. Orthodox physicians only gained control over the knowledge of cholera by avoiding public epistemic debates. At the turn of the century, elites within the American Medical Association (AMA) consolidated professional authority by convincing economic elites - especially the Rockefeller Foundation - to fund and promote their epistemological project of bacteriology outside the purview of the government. Using the extensive private resources of philanthropies, orthodox physicians achieved epistemic closure, gained professional recognition, and eliminated competing medical sects. This research locates the origins of the AMA's hostility toward state intervention in medicine in an earlier era than generally assumed. Furthermore, it illuminates the inherent tension between exclusionary epistemologies that justify professionalization and the epistemology of democratic institutions that stresses participatory knowledge production. Insofar as government institutions are the means by which citizens exert democratic control, the process by which orthodox physicians achieved epistemic closure was anti-democratic as it circumvented these institutions, leaving in its wake a profession insulated from public scrutiny and oversight.
...MoreDescription Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. : doc. no. 3427988.
Thesis
Sliter-Hays, Sara Maria;
(2008)
Narratives and Rhetoric: Persuasion in Doctors' Writings about the Summer Complaint, 1883--1939
(/isis/citation/CBB001561173/)
Article
Robert Bartlett;
Yamaan Saadeh;
(2016)
Victor Vaughan (1851–1929) and the Birth of Bacteriology in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB802547446/)
Book
Baker, Robert B.;
Caplan, Arthur L.;
Emanuel, Linda L.;
Latham, Stephen R.;
(1999)
The American Medical Ethics Revolution: How the AMA's Code of Ethics Has Transformed Physician's Relationships to Patients, Professionals, and Society
(/isis/citation/CBB000110666/)
Article
Ogawa, Mariko;
(2000)
Uneasy Bedfellows: Science and Politics in the Refutation of Koch's Bacterial Theory of Cholera
(/isis/citation/CBB000111794/)
Book
Gradmann, Christoph;
(2009)
Laboratory Disease: Robert Koch's Medical Bacteriology
(/isis/citation/CBB001020408/)
Article
Hawgood, Barbara J.;
(2007)
Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine, CIE (1860--1930): Prophylactic Vaccination against Cholera and Bubonic Plague in British India
(/isis/citation/CBB000831622/)
Thesis
Patricia Palma;
(2017)
"Science Can't Save Me": Public Health, Professional Medicine, and Medical Pluralism in Peru, 1856-1935
(/isis/citation/CBB822671516/)
Book
Aberth, John;
(2011)
Plagues in World History
(/isis/citation/CBB001033389/)
Book
McKenna, Maryn;
(2010)
Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA
(/isis/citation/CBB001034264/)
Article
Ernesto Damiani;
(2023)
Medical Conan Doyle-Leucocytes, Bacteria and Phagocytosis Before Metchnikoff
(/isis/citation/CBB040207575/)
Article
Hawgood, Barbara J.;
(2007)
Albert Calmette (1863--1933) and Camille Guérin (1872--1961): The C and G of BCG Vaccine
(/isis/citation/CBB000831643/)
Article
Palmer, Steven;
(2011)
Beginnings of Cuban Bacteriology: Juan Santos Fernández, Medical Research, and the Search for Scientific Sovereignty, 1880--1920
(/isis/citation/CBB001231772/)
Article
Jones, Susan D.;
Teigen, Philip M.;
(2008)
Anthrax in Transit: Practical Experience and Intellectual Exchange
(/isis/citation/CBB000850412/)
Article
Stark, James F.;
(2012)
Bacteriology in the Service of Sanitation: The Factory Environment and the Regulation of Industrial Anthrax in Late-Victorian Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB001210693/)
Article
Almeida, Maria Antónia Pires de;
(2012)
The Portuguese cholera morbus Epidemic of 1853--56 as Seen by the Press
(/isis/citation/CBB001220430/)
Book
Whooley, Owen;
(2013)
Knowledge in the Time of Cholera: The Struggle over American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001420158/)
Article
Gradmann, Christoph;
(2008)
Locating Therapeutic Vaccines in Nineteenth-Century History
(/isis/citation/CBB000831744/)
Article
Stark, James F.;
(2012)
Anthrax and Australia in a Global Context: The International Exchange of Theories and Practices with Britain and France, c. 1850--1920
(/isis/citation/CBB001200700/)
Article
Margaret Pelling;
(2022)
Mythological Endings: John Snow (1813–1858) and the History of American Epidemiology
(/isis/citation/CBB716029329/)
Article
Alexander I. Parry;
(2023)
Delivering Bacteriology to the American Homemaker: Correspondence Education, Kitchen Experiments, and Public Health, 1890–1930
(/isis/citation/CBB239832240/)
Be the first to comment!