Kinderheilkunde and Continental Connections in Child Health: The “Glasgow School Revisited”—Again

The last two hundred years or so have seen the transformation of medical practice from a clinical art to the application of science to the diagnosis and treatment of disease. There has been a historical debate about how the use of technology and discoveries of the laboratory have become integrated within medical practice. In trying to understand the evolution of “scientific medicine,” this has generally focused on the tensions between the differing cultures, persons, and professions of the “laboratory” and “clinic” and sought to explain how they were resolved within specific institutions. This paper looks again at the “Glasgow School” (the subject of a number of seminal papers on this subject) and the forces that shaped it, by exploring the career of Leonard Findlay, whose training in Glasgow, and in Berlin (where he worked in a department in which science and medicine were integrated), defined a style of clinical medicine that formed the model for a new sort of university department of medicine in which clinicians and scientists worked side by side, albeit under the leadership of the former. As a clinician exposed in Berlin to the emerging new sciences of nutrition, microbiology, and immunology, which were particularly relevant to the care of sick children, Findlay created in Glasgow a department of medical pediatrics, which owed less to local factors, figures, and forces and more to his experience in Germany.