The Therapeutic Perspective [Paperback]

John Harley Warner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 10, 1997

This new paperback edition makes available John Harley Warner's highly influential, revisionary history of nineteenth-century American medicine. Deftly integrating social and intellectual perspectives, Warner explores a crucial shift in medical history, when physicians no longer took for granted such established therapies as bloodletting, alcohol, and opium and began to question the sources and character of their therapeutic knowledge. He examines what this transformation meant in terms of patient care and assesses the impact of clinical research, educational reform, unorthodox medical movements, newly imported European method, and the products of laboratory science on medical ideology and action.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Warner defines therapeutics as both "a cognitive system and a set of social practices," and, in exploring the development of medical therapeutics in 19th-century America, he assesses the social and intellectual context. He sets himself the difficult task of assessing what physicians were actually doing to their patients and the efficacy of patient care. He uses the case records for the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Cincinnati Commercial Hospital, and considers how the Paris Clinical School and the empiricism/rationalism debate influenced patient care in America. This is a very thorough, scholarly work, using much primary source material. It belongs in all history of science and medicine collections. Frances Groen, McGill Univ. Medical Lib., Montreal
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Combining a prodigiously researched and thoroughly fascinating depiction of actual nineteenth-century therapy with a sophisticated and widely applicable model of scientific change, The Therapeutic Perspective is a superb book, likely to become a classic in the literature of medical history." -- Martin S. Pernick, Science

"Warner tells his story in powerful and lucid book." -- Steven Shapin, The Times Higher Education Supplement

"[The Therapeutic Perspective] is a clearly written and well-organized analytic study that should bring much credit to its author, for he has made far more understandable an important aspect of our history." -- Gert H. Brieger, M.D., Journal of the American Medical Association

A sophisticated argument. . . . Judged by its methodology, insights, presentation, and prose, this book ranks as a model of American scholarship. -- Dora B. Weiner, Social History of Medicine

A sophisticated argument.... Judged by its methodology, insights, presentation, and prose, this book ranks as a model of American scholarship. -- Dora B. Weiner, Social History of Medicine

Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (November 10, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691012091
• ISBN-13: 978-0691012094
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,320,434 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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