214 Numbers
science—the faculty at the Palmer School of Chiropractic, for example,
dismissed chemical and microscopic studies as “useless”—but they ac-
tively pursued an older style of observational science, associated with the
tradition of natural history and based on observation in their clinics and
museums, which housed sizeable osteological collections. By the early
1910s chiropractors were promoting their system not merely as science
but as “the only truly scientifi c method of healing.”^62
The embarrassing proliferation of medical sects, each claiming scien-
tifi c truth, led many physicians, sectarian as well as regular, to search for
common ground sanctifi ed by science. As early as the 1860s some progres-
sive homeopathic physicians were calling for less dogmatism and more
freedom to participate in “the Republic of Scientifi c Medicine.”^63 By the
last years of the century even regular leaders were calling for unity based
on science. “The tendency in America is to give up all sects in medicine
and allow physicians to choose their professional associates purely on the
ground of integrity and personal preference,” Louis Faugères Bishop in-
formed the New York Academy of Medicine in 1898. “The modern school
of scientifi c medicine relies for its recognition and support upon a pub-
lic, educated in modern philosophy, a public dominated by the scientifi c
spirit of a scientifi c age.”^64 Three years later AMA president Charles A. L.
Reed proclaimed “the existence of a new school of medicine” based on
scientifi c medicine. “It is as distinct from the schools of fi fty years ago as
is the Christian dispensation from its Pagan antecedents. It is the product
of convergent infl uences, of diverse antecedents.”^65 The sometime school-
master Abraham Flexner, in his famous indictment of North American
medical schools in 1910, credited scientifi c medicine with erasing sectar-
ian distinctives because “science and dogma” could not coexist. “No man
is asked in whose name he comes—whether that of Hahnemann, Rush, or
of some more recent prophet,” he wrote. “To plead in advance a principle
couched in pseudo- scientifi c language or of extra- scientifi c character is to
violate scientifi c quality.”^66 The stubborn persistence of Christian Science,
osteopathy, and chiropractic—as well as a swarm of even newer healing
alternatives in the twentieth century—gave the lie to such fatuous beliefs,
but the ongoing struggle over sects and science illustrates just how mal-
leable the term science was.“SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE”
Probably no practice in the historiography of medicine has distorted a
proper understanding of the relationship between science and medicine