Rethinking the History of Peptic Ulcer Disease: from digital textual analysis to declining research programs

Abstract

The history of the research on peptic ulcer disease (PUD) is characterized by a premature abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis, which subsequently had its comeback, leading to the discovery of Helicobacter pylori the major cause of the disease. In this paper we examine the received view on this case, according to which the primary reason for the abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis of PUD in the mid-twentieth century was a large-scale study by a prominent gastroenterologist Palmer, which suggested no bacteria could be found in the human stomach. To this end, we employ the method of digital textual analysis and study the literature on the etiology of PUD published in the decade prior to Palmers article. Our findings suggest that the bacterial hypothesis of PUD had already been abandoned before the publication of Palmers paper, which challenges the widely held view that his study played a crucial role in the development of this episode. The paper makes two main contributions to the literature in integrated history and philosophy of science. First, we suggest that the received narrative on this historical episode, commonly used by philosophers, needs to be revised. Second, we introduce the notion of a declining research program and argue for its importance as a unit of socio-epistemic analysis, especially in combination with normative assessments, such as pursuitworthiness of scientific theories.

A Scientometric Approach to the Integrated History and Philosophy of Science: Entrenched Biomedical Standardisation and Citation-Exemplar

“…Our novelty in this paper lies in showing how integrating various scientometric tools and content-based analyses allows philosophers to investigate why, when, what, and how the standardization of scientific practice in a given biomedical field is established and entrenched. Between 2018 and 2023, there is an increased number of philosophical articles engaging in SciHPS (Zou & Laubichler 2018;Gibson & Ermus 2019;Yan, Tsai, Huang 2021 and2022;Mizrahi 2020Mizrahi & 2021Malaterre, Lareau, Pulizzotto & St-Onge 2020;Radomski, Šešelja, Naumann 2020;Allen & Murdock 2022;McLevey 2018;Khelfaoui et al 2021;Yan and Liao 2023). It shows that philosophers are already experimenting with the potential of integrating scientometric tools with philosophical analyses to address issues in the integrated history and philosophy of science.…”