Teamwork, Clinical Research, and the Development of Scientific Medicines in Interwar Britain: The "Glasgow School" Revisited

This article argues that historians of medicine have, until very recently, misinterpreted the relationship of "science" and "the clinic" in the early twentieth century. It follows recent historiographic developments in focusing on the relationship in practice as exemplified by the development of a specific variety of collaborative clinical research using laboratory methods, ca. 1919–37, in a major British medical school. It suggests that it is such working hybrids that should be studied in order to understand fully the development of scientific medicines in the United Kingdom in this period. In Glasgow, it was the local medical culture's characteristic local subservience to clinical priorities that facilitated, in a particular kind of academic unit, a certain type of hierarchical teamwork between clinicians and laboratory workers; the paper reveals how and why this teamwork became, over time, more of an equal partnership.