208 Numbers
Given these science- inspired aids to the practice of medicine, physi-
cians possessed very practical—as well as professional—reasons for em-
bracing science.
Although physiology and pathology have grabbed most of the atten-
tion of future- looking historians, during the fi rst two- thirds of the nine-
teenth century medical geography, broadly conceived, reigned as the
queen of the medical sciences. This was especially true outside of Europe,
in regions such as India, North Africa, and North America.^33 When, in
1787, Benjamin Rush and his friends created the College of Physicians of
Philadelphia to advance “the science of medicine,” they determined to
do so not by establishing laboratories but “by investigating the diseases
and remedies which are peculiar to our country; by observing the effects
of different seasons, climates and situations upon the human body; by re-
cording the changes that are produced in diseases, by the progress of agri-
culture, arts, population, and manners; by searching for medicines in our
woods, waters and the bowels of the earth; by enlarging our avenues to
knowledge, from the discoveries and publications of foreign countries.”^34
Nearly a century later, as germs began pushing miasmas to the periphery
of medical science, Nathan Smith Davis repeated much the same message:
“We cannot advance one step in the study of the causes of disease and the
laws that govern their action, without a knowledge of the earth, the air,
the water, the products of vegable [sic] and animal growth and decay; or in
more technical language, without entering directly into the departments
of general science, called geology, meteorology, topography, hydrology,
and general chemistry.”^35 America’s mushrooming medical schools rarely,
if ever, taught medical geography as a separate subject, but early medical
societies and journals frequently urged its cultivation, as did the offi ce of
the U.S. Surgeon General. For an age that traced the origin of much dis-
ease to fi lth and other environmental factors, searching for correlations
between topography and disease made eminent scientifi c sense.^36
Despite America’s reluctant embrace of medical science, by the 1830s
and 1840s events were nudging the medical community further into the
arms of science. John Harley Warner has estimated that between 1815
and 1860 one thousand American physicians sailed to Paris to witness the
wonders of medical science for themselves. Few of these medical pilgrims
returned to replicate what they had seen, but the experience abroad left
an indelible impression. “Merely to have breathed a concentrated scien-
tifi c atmosphere like that of Paris,” gushed young Oliver Wendell Hol-
mes during his 1833 sojourn, “must have an effect on anyone who has
lived where stupidity is tolerated, where mediocrity is applauded, and
where excellence is defi ed.”^37 Unfortunately for the cause of science, the