Against the Spirit of System [Hardcover]

John Harley Warner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 22, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0691012032 | ISBN-13: 978-0691012032 | Edition: 1

This wide-ranging exploration of American medical culture examines a powerful intellectual and social influence: the radical empiricism of the Paris Clinical School. The book uses private diaries, family letters and student notebooks and explores regionalism, gender and class.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Against the Spirit of the System provides the best view yet of a lost medical culture... It is enormously important for anyone seeking to understand either nineteenth-century medical life in America, or how culture and memory come to be embedded in physicians' careers.

(Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2005)

Warner's richly satisfying book will be indispensable to anyone interested in the history of American medicine of in the historical meanings of cultural migration.

(George Weisz Journal of the American Medical Association 2006)

The book's force derives from its combination of detailed and evocative prosopography with a rigorously articulated argument about how 'Paris-returned' physicians retrospectively constructed Paris medicine to give meaning to their French sojourn in the context of American culture and society.

(Matthew Ramsey Times Literary Supplement )

John Harley Warner has written a magisterial book. In examining how nearly a century of American physicians remembered and reconstructed their experiences studying medicine in Paris, Warner explains how Americans invented and reinvented their own profession, shaped and expressed their values, and even developed their personal identities... This is a work of enormous ambition, and it is enormously successful... a superb medical history.

(Morris J. Vogel American Historical Review )

Warner writes well, and the book is full of fascinating details and long quotes from actual letter and diaries written by Americans who made the trip to Paris. Like all good history, it says as much about the present as about the past.

(John D. Lantos Perspectives in Biology and Medicine )

This is an extremely impressive historical narrative. Not only does Warner recount in great detail the variety of experiences, meanings, and uses of French medicine to American physicians in the nineteenth century, but in providing a fine grained discursive analysis of orthodox American medicine's process of professionalization, he also showcases an outstanding model of historical methodology.

(Stephen C. Kenney Journal of the Early Republic )

Warner offers not only a fresh interpretation of American émigré medical education but also an analytic method that others should consider as they reread the medical narratives that have informed historians' understanding of the rise of American professionalization and specialization.

(Howard I. Kushner Journal of American History )

In this masterful description of what students encountered in Paris and how it subsequently affected medicine in American, John Warner has given us a new and far richer view of Parisian medicine of the early nineteenth century than we have heretofore had.

(Gert H. Brieger North Carolina Historical Review )

John Harley Warner has produced a book which is never dull and always thought-provoking in the fields of ethics, medicine, and history. His scholarship and research is always relevant and the attention to detail is reminiscent of Ellman's biography of Oscar Wilde... It was a project that needed to be done and has been done well.

(John W. K. Ward Canadian Bulletin of Medical History )

John Harley Warner knows more about the travels of nineteenth century Americans to medical Paris than any other historian... [His] book is a stimulating example of fresh archival research that opens new windows on an important period on American medicine. It certainly stimulated me to think again about previous work on this subject.

(Thomas Neville Bonner Medical History )

Warner's remarkably thorough research has uncovered invaluable personal papers and diaries of American physicians who studies in Paris. In Warner's hands, these materials eloquently recreate the texture of the life of a medical student in early-nineteenth-century Paris.

(David S. Barnes Annals of Internal Medicine )

The appearance of John Harley Warner's marvelous Against the Spirit of System in paperback is a boon to scholars interested in such questions.

(Richard C. Keller Perspectives in Biology and Medicine )

Outstanding storytelling, scholarly use of primary sources, and selfless offerings of new and interesting research projects.

(Karol K. Weaver Nursing History Review ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

John Harley Warner is Professor of the History of Medicine and Science and of American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, newly available in paperback through Princeton University Press.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 472 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr; 1 edition (December 22, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691012032
• ISBN-13: 978-0691012032
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,625,365 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Impressive, Authoritative, and Essential, December 4, 2011

By 

Rodger Shepherd (Oakland, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Paperback)

I am a retired physician, and when I read David McCullough's recent book "The Greater Journey", I became fascinated with medicine in Paris around 1830. I have now read a dozen books related to this topic (histories, biographies, diaries, contemporary medical books, etc.) Fortunately I saved Warner's "Against the Spirit of System" for last. This book has tied together everything that I had already read and has added even more. Warner is an extremely thoughtful and thorough historian. He writes very well. His use of original sources is masterful. He explains his approach as he goes along. This book is clearly the best book on the topic. It is also a wonderful example of historical method at its best.

5.0 out of 5 stars Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in 19th Century American Medicine, July 14, 2009

By 

Ron Squire Steffey "ron squire steffey" (Williamsburg, Va.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Paperback)

Needed this out-of-the-way book because it has a section on Joseph Shelton Watson, 1801 grad of William and Mary. He was the first Virginian to create and send aloft a hot-air balloon!!!!!