Medical History and History of Racism Flashcards
(36 cards)
therapeutic system
complex set of processes by which a society accounts for and responds to perceived disease
Most illness episodes in the US today (75%) are managed by. . .
. . . individuals, with treatment decisions based on their own experience
__% of patients sought care from an ‘unconventional healer’ within the past year.
34% of patients sought care from an ‘unconventional healer’ within the past year.
Annual out-of-pocket spending on alternative medicine is ___ relative to annual out-of-pocket spending on conventional medicine.
Annual out-of-pocket spending on alternative medicine is roughly equal relative to annual out-of-pocket spending on conventional medicine.
What is a profession?
A field granted a legal monopoly through policed liscensure and granted a substantial deal of autonomy, with the ability to self-regulate and train future professionals. Often involves mastery of a set of knowledge and the provision of some sort of public good.
William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine
Published in 1769. The second highest selling book in the American colonies only to the Bible. Highlights that self-treatment was common and often valorized as part of the ideal of American self-sufficiency
First professional medical society in America
The Massachussetts Medical Society, founded in 1781 by Dr John Warren in hopes “that a just discrimination should be made between such as are duly educated, and properly qualified for the duties of their profession, and those who may ignorantly and wickedly administer medicine.”
Almost immediately, the MMS ran into conflict with HMS as to whether or not an HMS degree was sufficient liscensure to practice medicine
In the first few hospitals in the colonies. . .
- Admissions were controlled by trustees rather than doctors
- No nurses, families were expected to provide all food and nursing care
- Wards were unregulated and full of prostitution and gambling
- Hygiene was so bad that diseases were often contracted at hospitals
- Hospitals had no role in medical education - in fact students were discouraged from going as to examine an ill patient as a student was seen as offensive and a waste of the patient’s time and energy
Boston University School of Medicine was founded as. . .
. . . a homeopathic medical school
Mary Baker Eddy established Christian Science in. . .
. . . Boston in 1866
A survey in Tennessee in 1851, to which 201 “doctors” responded, revealed that . . .
. . . 35 had obtained an MD, 42 had attended some lectures, 27 were botanics, and 97 were self-taught.
The American Medical Association was founded in . . .
. . . 1847
The first demonstration of anesthesia used for surgery by Morton and Warren was at the Ether Dome at MGH in . . .
. . . October 1846
Carney Hospital and Boston City Hospital
Opened in 1863 and 1864 in Boston amid racial tensions in order to care for the segregated Irish immigrants.
Beth Israel
opened in 1916 for Jewish patients
Rise of germ theory
First gained popularity in the 1870’s and 1880’s. This was when allopathic medicine really began to stand out from competing “medical” fields. This is also when hospitals and medical schools began to associate with laboratory-based science research.
The first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1901, to Emil von Behring for producing the first antitoxin to diphtheria, another huge win for Germ Theory
The first Nobel Prize in Physics
1901, Rontgen for X-rays
The graduate-level, 2 year/2 year medical school model
Started by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1893
it required a bachelors degree for admission, and its four-year curriculum included two years of pre-clinical coursework and two years of intensive inpatient clinical training.
The Flexner Report
Delivered in 1910. Flexner, a member of the AMA, visited all 155 medical schools in the US and found that most medical schools were stand-alone institutions, not affiliated with a university. They had no laboratories. The cadavers were not preserved, resulting in terrible conditions in the anatomy labs. He also found that there were too many physicians.
Flexner recommended that most of these schools close (from 155 to 31), and that the surviving schools adopt the Hopkins model, with, among other things, the hospital at the center of medical education
By 1920, . . .
. . . The allopathic medical model, which had become synonymous with scientific medicine, was recognized as the only viable medicine by government and granted the only medical liscensure power. All medical schools switched to a hospital-centered John Hopkins model.
School for Health Officers
Established jointly by HMS and MIT in 1913. Would eventually become the Harvard School of Public Health, starting officially in 1922.
Women at HMS
Women first requested admission to HMS in 1847. The President and Fellows of Harvard College considered the issue twice that year, but did not “deem it advisable” to change the male-only policy. In 1848 the Boston Female Medical College opened. When the HMS faculty voted to admit a woman in 1850, HMS students protested her admission and the faculty rescinded their offer.
In 1878 Marian Hovey offered HMS $10,000 if it would admit women. The faculty voted to change the policy only if a proper sum (e.g., $200,000) were raised. By the 1880s, when it looked like that sum might be raised, most of the faculty vowed to resign if women were admitted; the Overseers voted to refuse the gift.
This pattern of sexist behavior continued for decades, until the domestic needs of World War II finally forced HMS to admit women.
E.H. Clarke’s notorious 1873 Sex in Education lecture
warned about the dangers of educating women: if women, especially adolescents, devoted too much energy to education, then their brains would develop at the expense of their reproductive organs, leaving them infertile, possibly even dead.
