4. An Applied Science Between Laboratory and Clinic – Scientific Medicine in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany

Abstract

When there is mention of "scientific medicine" in the historical literature, it is mostly used as a generic term describing virtually all forms of (mod ern) science-based medicine before the age of biomedicine. What is there by obscured, as I will demonstrate in this chapter and the next, is that the German version -wissenschaftliche Medicin -as well as the English rendering each indicated very specific and historically bounded programs. I pointed out in the introduction that especially for English-speaking historians, scientific medicine means a variety of different science-based approaches to medicine, ranging from rationalistic systems of pathology and therapeutics in the eighteenth century through application of natural history to the clinic in the early-nineteenth century to medicine grounded in experimental laboratory science (Hagner 2003, Warner 1995. All these programs did indeed make claims to scientificity, but they did not use the moniker of scientific medicine to make these claims. The Anglo-American renderings of the concept of scientific medicine have led to some confu sion in the case of nineteenth-century German science and medicine, on which I focus here. 50 How has that occurred?The analytical use of the term scientific medicine by scholars to de scribe the German context actually turns out to be somewhat of a false friend. The English-language use differs considerably from the German meaning. While the Anglo-American understanding of scientific medicine comprised a broad category, the German term for scientific medicine (wis senschaftliche Medicin) represents a very specific program, which competed with other contemporaneous programs over the dominant description of academic medicine and medical science around the mid-nineteenth centu ry. But social historians of science and medicine in the Anglo-American tradition understand scientific medicine as a general form of German academic medicine, which developed since mid-century centered on the 4. 50 The concept is usually placed into the context of the political and industrial modernization of the German states in the second half of the nineteenth century, in which also the general social and cultural appreciation of natural science is said to have increased (