Great feuds in medicine
Subtitle: ten of the liveliest disputes ever
By: Hal Hellman.
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2001
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 237
Subjects: Medicine -- History -- Miscellanea.; History of Medicine, Modern.
Genres: Miscellanea.
Description: Documents 10 dramatic medical disputes. British anatomist William Harvey's 1628 discovery of blood circulation challenged anatomical theory and caused his ostracism by the scientific community. In the late 18th-century, electrical disputes raged between Galvani whose "animal electricity" theory, to modern sensibilities, borders on the occult, though it garnered immediate support and prefigured current studies of electricity and paralysis and Volta, who worked to disprove Galvani. Claude Bernard's experiments on animals, in his studies of the nervous system, caused outrage among antivivisectionists and led to his being disowned by his family. Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis was committed to a mental hospital after the Viennese medical establishment rejected his hypothesis that unsanitary conditions in his workplace (doctors went from an autopsy to a birth without washing their hands) caused the high infection and death rate among patients. Other chapters address "Freud.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [187]-225) and index.
Table of contents: title: Harvey versus Primrose, Riolan, and the Anatomists: circulation of the blood; title: Galvani versus Volta: animal electricity; title: Semmelweis versus the Viennese medical establishment: childbed fever; title: Bernard versus chemists, physicians, and antivivisectionists: experimental medicine; title: Pasteur versus Liebig, Pouchet, and Koch: fermentation, spontaneous generation, and germ theory; title: Golgi versus Rámon y Cajal: the nerve network; title: Freud versus Moll, Breuer, Jung, and many others: psychoanalysis; title: Sabin versus Salk: the polio vaccine; title: Franklin versus Wilkins: the structure of DNA; title: Gallo versus Montagnier: the AIDS war.