216 Numbers
nervous and arterial sedatives for allaying nervous restlessness and con-
trolling the circulation, the mechanical appliances for dressing wounds
and injuries, preventing or relieving deformities, and a thousand other
things that have been added directly to the daily practice of our art.”^73
Lord Lister nominated the adoption of surgical anesthesia in the 1840s,
the development of antiseptic surgery in the 1860s, and the discovery of
x- rays in the 1890s.^74 In 1900 the British physician Philip H. Pye- Smith,
who believed that medicine’s claim to be “a true science” rested on its
ability to make accurate predictions, cited “the detection and treatment of
plumbism [chronic lead poisoning], the diagnosis and cure of scabies and
ringworm, the treatment of poisons by chemical antidotes, and of spe-
cifi c disease by attenuated inoculations”—along with the recent discovery
of the origin of malaria—as “instances of strictly scientifi c medicine.”^75
A few years later the New York physician Alexander Lambert described
the therapeutic fruits of the germ theory as “one of the most brilliant
achievements of scientifi c medicine.” In his opinion, “the most complete
adaptation of pure scientifi c work to clinical medicine” came in the early
1890s, when Emil von Behring and others working at the Koch Institute
in Berlin developed antitoxins for diphtheria and tetanus that had been
“conceived and worked out completely in the laboratory before [being]
applied to medicine.”^76
The American press, as Bert Hansen has recently shown, generated its
own list of breakthroughs in scientifi c medicine, which, he argues, led to
“an entirely new idea bec[oming] embedded in popular consciousness:
that medical research could provide widespread benefi ts.” The fi rst medi-
cal event to grab the reading public’s attention was Pasteur’s development
in 1885 of a vaccine against rabies. In covering the dramatic story of four
Newark children who had been rushed across the Atlantic to the Pasteur
Institute in Paris after being bitten by an apparently rabid dog, New York–
area newspapers told of local physicians, dubbed “the Newark Scientists,”
who infected rabbits with nerve tissue taken from the offending dog to
determine its virulence. The excitement over the rabies vaccine was fol-
lowed in quick order by the announcement in 1889 of Charles- Édouard
Brown- Séquard’s use of testicular extracts from animals to rejuvenate the
elderly, Robert Koch’s fi nding in 1890 of a purported cure for tuberculosis
(tuberculin), the introduction of diphtheria antitoxin in 1894, based on
the work of Émile Roux and Emil von Behring, and Wilhelm Röntgen’s dis-
covery of x- rays in 1895. By the turn of the century microscopes and white
“lab coats” were serving the trademarks of the medical profession.^77
For many physicians and large segments of the public, scientifi c medi-
cine, however understood, came to represent all that was good in medi-