by Timothy C. Jacobson
University of Alabama Press, 1987
Paper: 978-0-8173-5243-1 | Cloth: 978-0-8173-0315-0
Library of Congress Classification RA982.N26V365 1987
Dewey Decimal Classification 610.72076855

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
A study of the union of science and medicine in a particularly illustrative institutional setting
 
Making Medical Doctors is not a conventional institutional history, but rather a study of the union of science and medicine in a particularly illustrative institutional setting. Its general subject is the institution where science and medicine most dramatically came together: the modern medical school and medical center. Its particular subject is the medical school and center of Vanderbilt University, which was rebuilt in the 1920s as a model for medical education and research. Making Medical Doctors also explores the intellectual and financial sources of institutional development: the worlds of Abraham Flexner, Frederick T. Gates, and Henry S. Pritchett, three foundation masters of the early 20th century. It examines closely the vanished medical world of that generation of doctors who reached the height of their influence in the period between the two world wars and describes how they actually did medicine, surgery, and science.
 
The convergence of science and medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries produced what we know today as modern medicine. The balance of power and interdependence between science and medicine have changed vastly from the 1920s and 1930s, as Vanderbilt’s story clearly illustrates.