Treccani History of Science
The Nineteenth Century
H6 – Medical sciences
Edited by Gilberto Corbellini
Medicine and society
• 1. Medicine in changing society.
• 2. Monopoly and the liberal medical profession.
• 3. The role of science.
• 4. Preventing disease.
• 5. Paying the doctor.
• 6. The national and the international.
• 7. The individual, the State and the medicine.
Pathology
• 1. The origins of morbid anatomy as a discipline
• 2. Reconsidering autopsy and the invention of the pathologist: Paris and Vienna –
• 3. Virchow’s pathology and the rise of scientific medicine
The aetiopathological study of infectious diseases
• 1. Scientific knowledge of the causes of epidemics
• 2. The impact of cholera pandemics
• 3. The hygienist movement
• 4. The first demonstrations of the microbial etiology of contagious diseases
• 5. The theoretical basis of the new discipline
• 6. The major infectious diseases
• 7. From microbiological theory to health practice
Diagnosis
• 1. New concepts of disease.
• 2. Bedside medicine: nosography to Osler
• 3. Physical diagnosis
• 4. Observation, description and measurement
Medical instruments
• 1. Auscultation and percussion: audible evidence of disease.
• 2. Visual means of diagnosing illness.
• 3. Measurement of temperature, pulse and blood pressure.
• 4. Instrumentation and the physician’s identity.
Therapeutics
• 1. Bleeding and its critics.
• 2. Pharmacological therapies and the rise of a pharmaceutical industry.
• 3. Anaesthesia.
• 4. Surgical therapies
• 5. Electrotherapeutics.
• 6. Alternative medical theories and therapies
Psychiatry and institutions
• 1. The rise of the asylum and moral treatment.
• 2. Early treatments.
• 3. German psychopathology and psychiatry.
• 4. Degeneration and pessimism.
• 5. Psychiatric nosology and the classification of psychosis.