The Scientific Revolution in Victorian Medicine

This is a bit of a specialized book that goes into a great deal of detail on the history of two specific innovations in Victorian medicine: anesthesia, particularly the use of chloroform and particularly its role in midwifery; and sterile technique in surgery. It also touches on the “hospitalism” controversy that was stirred up by Sir James Simpson's proposal to do away with crowded, unsanitary hospitals and replace them with the Victorian equivalent of mobile clinics.

Drawing heavily on the Lancet as the voice of the medical community at the time, as well as much detailed research into the backgrounds and writings of the people involved, Youngson gives a sense of how alien the Victorian world was in its medical practice while at the same time hitting notes of eerily familiar to anyone following various modern medical or quasi-medical debates. He reminds us that what is obvious in hindsight was often obscure at the time, and that the rate if not quite the direction of technological change is driven at least as much by fashion and social circumstances as science.

Science–which is the public testing of ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment–involves a great deal of concrete, detailed, precise attention, which is not something human beings have a superabundance of. I know I don't. Humans are lazy and tend at our worst to interact with abstractions rather than external reality. This makes proving novel ideas to ordinary people extremely difficult, because empirical proof happens in concrete, detailed, precise reality, not vague “big picture” ideological abstractions. Badly performed anesthesia could kill patients. Incorrect sterile technique in a clean hospital could achieve almost as good outcomes as correct sterile technique in a dirty one. Statistical comparisons across radically inhomogenous samples is fraught with difficulties.

The great lesson of science is: details matter, and a mind that is incapable of focusing on a plethora of details–due either to simple lack of ability or because it has been blinded by looking too long into the blinding light of ideology–will be incapable of changing its beliefs due to empirical demonstration.

We owe the revolution in Victorian medicine to those few, rare minds who took reality seriously enough to pay attention to it, and understanding their struggles is an aid to those of us who would like a little more reality in our public discourse today.