Science and Medicine 209much- mentioned American obsession with practice and “getting ahead”
deterred even scientifi cally inclined physicians from engaging in research.
As one Yankee medical professor warned a student contemplating a sci-
entifi c career, “You will lose a patient for every experiment you make in
the laboratory.”^38
Chauvinistic Americans took understandable pride in the mite they
did contribute to antebellum medical science. They lauded the military
surgeon William Beaumont, whose extensive experiments on the acces-
sible stomach of Alexis St. Martin led in 1833 to a landmark treatise on the
physiology of digestion, for his “devotion to the improvement of medi-
cal science.”^39 And they credited “modern science” with discovering “that
mental maladies are as susceptible of cure as corporeal.” The resulting
treatment, called moral therapy, produced a wave of asylum- building dur-
ing the second third of the century.^40 But most of all, Americans celebrated
the discovery of surgical anesthesia in Boston in 1846. Although occasion-
ally dismissed as quackery, it soon came to symbolize the beginning of a
new era in surgery, made possible by the demonstration of “one of the
most glorious truths of science.”^41
By midcentury, gleams of optimism were beginning to appear, although
reform- minded American physicians continued to contrast the high state
of medical science in Europe with its dismal condition in America. A spe-
cial committee on medical education appointed in 1849 by the newly
founded American Medical Association (AMA) had the following to say:
Many intelligent men have doubted whether medicine was, or could be, a
science. This skepticism still prevails extensively amongst the educated. It
was not without foundation until a comparatively recent period. But within
the last half century, no one acquainted with the progress of medicine can
hesitate to recognize its rapid expansion into a science, and that it is rapidly
entering the circle of the positive sciences. It is now far more certain in the
judgments and opinions of well- educated medical men, than are the law,
theology, or the moral sciences.The American doctors expressed regret that they and their country
had not participated more actively in “the movement of progress,” but,
like so many reformers, they placed the blame solidly on the shoulders
of medical educators: “It is vain to expect that medicine, as a science,
can be widely known and diffused, when it is not taught as a science in
the schools.”^42
In a country plagued by a surplus of low- quality proprietary medi-
cal schools, which lacked a single laboratory until 1871, the outlook for