Science and Medicine 215more than the uncritical (and perhaps unconscious) use of the term “sci-
entifi c medicine” to describe what became of medicine in the late nine-
teenth century. Instead of looking at the origin and use of the slogan, too
many historians have employed it descriptively, suggesting by their use
that medicine did not become truly scientifi c until the late nineteenth
century, when the term enjoyed wide circulation. As one historian has
expressed the common view, “In the last third of the nineteenth century,
in response to bacteriological discoveries and technological innovations
that ushered in dramatic advances, the practice of medicine became a
science.”^67 If so, then anyone who thought that medicine had become
a science earlier than the last third of the nineteenth century must have
been mistaken or deluded. Some historians have written anachronistically
of “scientifi c medicine” in the eighteenth century (or earlier), adopting
it as a synonym for the then- used terms “philosophical” or “rational”
medicine.^68 To alleviate such confusion, John Harley Warner has taken to
referring to “the new scientifi c medicine” when speaking of developments
in the last decades of the nineteenth century.^69
The precise origins of the term “scientifi c medicine” are lost in the
haze of history, but by the 1840s, decades before the germ theory arrived,
it had come into common usage. In 1844 medical progressives in Berlin
founded the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Medicin (Society for Sci-
entifi c Medicine), which provided a forum two years later for the bud-
ding young cellular pathologist Rudolf Virchow to address the subject
of scientifi c medicine. Noting that the very phrase needed clarifi cation,
he explained that “Scientifi c medicine is compounded of two integrated
parts—pathology, which delivers, or is supposed to deliver, information
about the altered conditions and altered physiological phenomena, and
therapy, which seeks out the means of restoring or maintaining normal
conditions.”^70 In 1865 Claude Bernard, perhaps the leading French pro-
moter of scientifi c medicine, published his Introduction à l’étude de la mé-
decine expérimentale, in which he argued that “scientifi c medicine, like the
other sciences, can be established only by experimental means, i.e. by
direct and rigorous application of reasoning to the facts furnished us by
observation and experiments.”^71
Most partisans of scientifi c medicine, like historians, rarely defi ned
what they meant by the term. Instead, they simply enumerated its ben-
efi ts and accomplishments. For some clinicians the introduction of the
clinical thermometer in the 1860s epitomized “the scientifi c approach
to medical research.”^72 For others, such as Nathan Smith Davis, the list
of ways in which the practice of medicine had profi ted from “the ad-
vancement of its science” included “anaesthetics for the relief of pain, the