Doctors: The Biography of Medicine

By 1932, the historian Henry E. Sigerist had noted that medicine’s systemizing impulses were “no longer concerned with man but with disease,” as Anderson and Mackay point out.

The true doctor would no longer be an intermediary with the gods but the bedside friend of the sick.

As scientific knowledge and technology advanced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what it meant to be a doctor changed. Michel Foucault’s insight about this change is well summarized by psychiatrist and medical historian Abraham Nussbaum: Foucault described the moment when physicians combined dissection with clinical practice as

‘The art has three factors, the disease, the patient, the physician,’ wrote Hippocrates,

Until the 20th century, wealthy households in China retained a well-known physician to be on constant call for the entire family, much as major corporations today retain renowned attorneys. The physician would visit the household regularly to check everyone’s health, dispense preventive advice and formulas, check on diets and personal habits, and g