Thesis ID: CBB001562748

Cholera and Quacks: The Epistemic Contest over Medicine in the 19th Century United States (2010)

unapi

Whooley, Owen (Author)


New York University


Publication Date: 2010
Physical Details: 461 pp.
Language: English

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.

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Description Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. : doc. no. 3427988.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001562748/

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Authors & Contributors
Stark, James F.
Hawgood, Barbara J.
Gradmann, Christoph
Yamaan Saadeh
Palma, Patricia
Alexander I. Parry
Concepts
Medicine
Bacteriology
Public health
Physicians; doctors
Cholera
Disease and diseases
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
Early modern
Modern
Medieval
Places
United States
Germany
France
Glasgow (Scotland)
England
Peru
Institutions
American Medical Association
Institut für Infektionskrankheiten, Berlin
Institut Pasteur, Paris
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