Victorian medicine

Nineteenth-century medicine is characterized by investigations at the cellular level (including microbial level), the molecular level, and by even more ruthless combination of observation and hypothetical reasoning. Rational, logical methods were notably a feature by the time of late Victorian medicine. For example, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle s medical school teacher taught the system of observation and deduction that is vividly expressed in Doyle s Sherlock Holmes stories. 

As Winter notes, In the later phase oF mesmerism s Victorian history, important changes took place in the authoritative status of the sciences and medicine. By 1870 new disciplinary divisions in science and medicine, brought on by reforms in university education and the new laboratories, left less space for the lines of inquiry that mesmerism required (Winter 6). 

Examples of other work on research schools M. Eckert, "Sommerfeld s School and the Electron Theory of Metals," HSPS 17 (1987) 191234 Gerald Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology The Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Society (Princeton Princeton University Press, 1978) L. J. Klosterman, "A Research School of Chemistry in the Nineteenth Century Jean Baptiste Dumas and His Research Students," Annals of Science 43 (1985) 180 H. A. M. Snelders, "J. H. van t Hoffs Research School in Amsterdam (18771895)," Janus 71 (1984) 130 F. L. Holmes, "The Formation of the Munich School of Metabolism," in William Coleman and F. L. Holmes, eds., The Investigative Enterprise Studies on Nineteenth-Century Physiology and Medicine (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London University of California Press, 1988). 

Department of Forensic Medicine, Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine and Monash University, 57-83 Kavanagh St, Southbank 3006, VC, Australia e-mail jochenb vifm.org... 

For a complete discussion of Farr s zymotic theory, see John M. Eyler, Victorian Social Medicine The Ideas and Methods of William Farr (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 97-122. 

However, chemistry, physics, and mathematics stand out as exceptional school subjects given this trend away from pre-requisites. Each of these subjects is still listed as pre-requisite for numerous university degree courses. For example, in the state of Victoria, Australia, the Victorian Tertiary Admission Council s (VTAC) Guide currently features chemistry as a pre-requisite for more than 100 undergraduate studies in the 13 universities. Psychology, traditional Chinese medicine, sports coaching and administration, aerospace, podiatry, speech pathology and information systems ask for school chemistry, but include no explicit chemistry in their university courses of study. 

Roy M. MacLeod is professor of history at the University of Sydney. Educated at Harvard, the LSE, and at Cambridge, where he took his Ph.D., he has written extensively in the history of science, medicine and technology. He has held senior appointments at the universities of Sussex and London and visiting appointments at many universities in Europe and the United States. He teaches military history, nuclear history, and the history of museums in Europe, Asia and Australasia. He has written or edited sixteen books, of which the most recent are Darwin s Laboratory Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific (Honolulu University of Hawaii Press, 1994), Technology and the Raj Technical Transfer and Technological Change in British India, 1780-1945 (New Delhi Sage, 1995), and Public Science and Public Policy in Victorian Britain (Aldershot Variorum, 1995). In 1996, he was Edelstein International Fellow in the History of Chemistry. 

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