A fascinating study of an equally fascinating phenomenon: the way that early twentieth-century clinical medicine grappled with the challenge of laboratory science.
SOCIAL HISTORY OF MEDICINE
It is always a pleasure reading the mature work, forcefully presented, of an experienced historian. . . . You don't have to be a historian of medicine to be inspired and embolded ... Read moreby this book.
Robert E. Kohler
ISIS
[Lawrence] offers a rich and detailed study that effectively integrates broad cultural, institutional, and medical trends to highlight the clash of medical cultures in the 1920s. The result is an impressively researched, engaging, and frequently challenging study.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
A marvelous demonstration of the value of institutional microhistory. This study of the constructive yet in some ways less than idyllic marriage between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Edinburgh medical establishment sheds fundamental light on the evolution of biomedicine medicine in the twentieth-century as well as the relationship between England and the United States.
Charles E. Rosenberg, Ernest Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University Christopher Lawrence shows how broad cultural trends and the perceived interests of historical actors played out in changing (or failing to change) medical institutions in 1920s Edinburgh. At the same time, he clearly indicates that the daily practice of doctors and scientists
and thus the knowledge they used and produced
were based in those doctors' and scientists' understanding of the resources of those institutions. His fine-grained empirical monograph thus demonstrates how institutions serve as connectors between larger social forces and the activities of individuals; it is an exemplary study in the historical sociology of biomedical science.
Edward T. Morman, Director, Wood Institute for the History of Medicine, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia Show Less