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44 In the course of the nineteenth century we see the rise of various biological fields of research, including physiology, microscopic anatomy, histology, and as the cell theory gains momentum in the last decades of the century, cytology. In assessing this moment when such areas of study emerged as bona fide disciplines, gathering all the resources of such a status (university departments, professional societies, professional journals, and course textbooks), one debate in the history of science and medicine has been about how and how quickly these bodies of knowledge infiltrated and transformed medical education and practice. Was there a scientific medicine in the second half of the nineteenth century, and how did the biological sciences intersect, even influence, the medical profession? The answer seems to be, at least for Great Britain, that well into the century practicing physicians often resisted science. Supported by patients’ expectations , many clung to the idea of the gentleman-doctor educated in the classics and practicing his “art” at the bedside.1 It was thought widely enough that a scientist-physician—too narrowly trained and putting faith in instruments instead of his own skills—was of little use in the real world of the sick. Even in the wake of the success of vaccinations and breakthroughs in the area of bacteriology, many senior British physicians would take on “vocabulary, which routinely invoked science as the foundation of medicine but which prescribed for science only a limited role in clinical practice.”2 The antivivisectionist movement played a part in this as well, leading a crusade well into the later decades of the nineteenth century “against the professionalization and institutionalization of experimental medicine, which was seen as a trend of foreign origin.”3 chaptertwo FacingAnimalsintheLaboratory Lessons of Nineteenth-Century Medical School Microscopy Manuals NancyAnderson Facing Animals in the Laboratory • 45 The biological sciences, however, had begun to influence medical education by midcentury. As professional research in physiology and histology expanded in continental Europe, by the 1820s forward-thinking British physicians and ambitious medical students had begun to travel to France and Germany to study in laboratories, returning with the belief that these disciplines held the key to their profession’s future. In her novel Middlemarch (1871), George Eliot captured this trend of medical students embarking on “study abroad” trips in the first half of the century and their indoctrination into the new microscopic life sciences. Her character, the young doctor Tertius Lydgate, who comes to practice in Eliot’s eponymous town in 1829, studied in Edinburgh and Paris as a student and owned a microscope, hoping in his spare time in Middlemarch to advance Xavier Bichat’s work on webs of tissues so as to “demonstrate the more intimate relations of living structure, and help to define men’s thought more accurately after the true order.” Bichat himself had rejected the microscope as an untrustworthy tool of investigation, and Lydgate is then meant to exemplify the next generation who showed more interest and confidence in this instrument. Eliot, who invented this character of circa 1830 from the vantage point of the late 1860s (when she wrote Middlemarch) and who was the partner of physiologist George Lewes, explained this in her text, noting that Lydgate was “ambitious above all to contribute towards enlarging the scientific, rational basis of his profession.”4 So, when these adventurous students, who traveled to laboratories on the Continent, returned home, they sought to spread their new knowledge , placing it within the context of modern means of understanding health and disease. They did so by offering classes and demonstrations for medical students in their own institutions, which would have an impact on the future of the medical curriculum. Classes in the basics of microscopic anatomy and histology were made available in medical schools in Great Britain in the 1840s, first as extramural offerings, and then later becoming curricular requirements.5 Pedagogical innovations, occurring not just in England, but across Europe and in the United States, included instituting the seminar in which students, no longer subject to passive learning by lecture alone, were “actively inducted into the craft and standards of their specialty by repeating exercises that were already part of the repertoire of the discipline,” and this included experimental procedures.6 Students were even finding their research worthy of space in the emerging professional scientific journals. Joseph Lister, while undertaking the duties of a medical resident at King’s College, for example, published his work [3.16.81.94] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 12...

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