Laboratory Politics

In their introduction to The laboratorv revolution in medicine the editors make a relatively unassailable case for the significance of the laboratory in modern medicine. Although "revolutionary" is possibly an unhelpful term, they argue that the "transition" to laboratory medicine was as revolutionary as "the transition to hospital medicine which preceded it" (p. 3). To substantiate this claim they point to historical studies which have elucidated both the cognitive novelty of laboratory science and the place of that science in medical education, medical practice, public health, and industry. The studies in the volume, although very uneven in quality, add further important matter to this literature. Under the title Medical innovations in historical perspective the consistently high quality studies in John Pickstone's volume, although telling us about innovation, also add yet more substance to our knowledge of the history of laboratory medicine. Ostensibly about innovation and the laboratory, the titles of these volumes might almost be exchanged without much loss of information about the contents. The essays in The laboratory revolution in medicine begin with two studies of laboratory medicine in Germany. The first by Timothy Lenoir explores the place of laboratory science as bourgeois culture. The second, by Richard Kremer, examines the particular contexts in which Prussian natural scientists promoted and pleaded for their disciplines. Jointly, these detailed essays will force historians to reflect on the variety of meanings physiology could have in early-nineteenth-century Germany, and on the elitism of its relatively few practitioners. John Harley Warner's excellent account of the role of the empirical in the culture of the mid-nineteenth-century American physician is a wonderfully tempting prelude to a non-existent second paper. Warner lucidly shows how, in the United States, the empirical in clinical practice was deemed to constitute the science of medicine. In this context, knowledge of laboratory science was seen as an important accomplishment, but hardly as the foundation of medicine. Warner leaves the reader longing for a full account of how that view was repudiated and how the laboratory did become the rhetorical and practical cornerstone of American medicine. He only hints, however, that, after 1870, it gained favour as Americans became committed to a culture of professionalism characterized by bureaucratic organization and specialized compartmentalism. Stewart Richards' curious piece on anaesthetics and animal experimentation, although very informative about the place of anaesthesia in the late Victorian laboratory, is not really an historical account at all, but …