Sublime

even at one of the world’s great academic medical centers you can easily declare yourself an expert in a condition that no one else wants to deal with.

transforming medicine from a healing-oriented moral practice into a diagnosis-oriented science focused on discernible, and replicable, test results.

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.

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 movement and constantly changing scenery helps the patient remember my advice, and helps me remember the encounter!