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Medicine of the 1820s
Author(s) -
Penner Louise
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00079.x
Subject(s) - pathological anatomy , german , romance , perspective (graphical) , focus (optics) , psychology , psychoanalysis , literature , history , aesthetics , medicine , philosophy , pathology , art , visual arts , physics , archaeology , optics
Abstract Medical debates of the 1820s involved issues of professionalism, ethics, and the proper means of scientific research into pathological anatomy and fevers. These developments were influenced eighteenth‐century German and Scottish philosophers’ focus on individuals as they exist within organisms or communities and, perhaps more importantly, in their particularity. This stress on individuals as discrete units was crucial not just for early nineteenth‐century pathological anatomy, but also for critical debates in the nineteenth century about disease origins and means of transmission. Our attention to 1820s medical efforts to observe the body's structures and the diseases which infected them may tell us much about Romantic and Victorian representational strategies.