Divided Legacy, Volume III: Science and Ethics in American Medicine [Paperback]

Harris Coulter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 1993

Divided Legacy (Vols. I-IV) is a history of Western medical philosophy from the time of Hippocrates to the twentieth century, treating it as a unified system of thought rather than a series of fortuitous discovers. Dr. Coulter interprets the development of medical ideas as the product of a conflict between two opposed systems of thought, Empiricism and Rationalism.

This third volume of Divided Legacy continues the account of the conflict between the Empirical and the Rationalist approaches to therapeutics but introduces a socio-economic dimension which had earlier been lacking. In the early nineteenth century, Samuel Hahnemann’s formulation of the Empirical therapeutic doctrine, which he called homeopathy. It flourished especially in the United States. This volume traces the history of the rise and decline of this formulation of Empirical therapeutics in the nineteenth century United States. It analyzes the interaction between the homeopathic doctrines and those of the orthodox school and attempts to illustrate the influence of socio-economic constraints on the movement of medical thought during this period.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Coulter’s book gives those of us involved in holistic practice a sense of history, a broad and humanizing perspective on the politics and economics of contending medical philosophies in the marketplace….His tone is unsensational and earnest. His research is stunning."
— Norman Weinstein in East-West Journal

About the Author

Harris Coulter is a native of Baltimore, Maryland, and a graduate of Yale University. He received his PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of numerous articles and several books on acupuncture, osteopathy, herbalism, and alternative health care.

Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: North Atlantic Books; 2nd edition (January 27, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0913028967
• ISBN-13: 978-0913028964
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.4 x 8.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,321,038 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A vital perspective on the emergence of scientific medicine., December 21, 2002

By 

David Nortman (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Divided Legacy, Volume III: Science and Ethics in American Medicine (Paperback)

This is the second of 4 volumes comprising a massive scholarly effort to cast the history of medicine in a fresh light, in counterpoint to most works in the field which are written by those unfamiliar with homeopathy. This volume deals with the period during which conventional, "scientific" medicine emerged triumphant against alternative, "metaphysical" approaches, with particular attention paid to the political struggle between the emerging conventional and homeopathic forms of medicine. Through a careful review of the history of 19th-century American medicine, the author argues that the struggle between the two systens of thought was political rather than scientific in focus, a matter not of careful investigation of the merits of each system but a product of a historically contingent chain of events, which in a different time or place might have taken a different turn. Most important, the reader is provided with information rarely mentioned in conventional recitations of the history of 19th-century medicine, which tend to demonize rather than pay careful attention to the many alternative forms of medicine practiced by medical doctors of the era. In the case of homeopathy, which at one point was practiced in some form or another by 20% of American MDs, such omission amounts to scholarly incompetence. Minimally, therefore, this version of the the history of the era ought to be considered less biased than most.
This is essential reading (together with the first volume of the series) for anyone interested in the true origins of western medicine from a perspective which doesn't antecedently glorify the subject matter. The author is strongly biased toward homeopathy, but despite this - or perhaps because of it - the truth is allowed to emerge about the political context in which conventional medicine established itself as uniquely valid in the eye of western thought. This is a serious piece of scholarship, with copious references provided for the researcher interested in pursuing this further.