|
KMID : 0857920220250010283
|
|
Yonsei Journal of Medical History
2022 Volume.25 No. 1 p.283 ~ p.320
|
|
|
A holistic vision of hospital reforms in the era of public hygiene: E. W. Lane’s MD thesis (1853)
|
|
Bae Min
|
|
|
Abstract
|
|
|
This article presents a microscopic picture centred around hospital reforms in the early 1850s through the eyes of a medical student named Edward W.
Lane (1823?1889). In his MD thesis (1853), Lane presented both his public-minded spirit, shared by other liberal Benthamite medical reformers of the time, and his own medical beliefs, which he further developed later in his medical career. For him, the ultimate goal of hospital reforms was to make the hospital the central therapeutic institution based on the holistic vision of hygiene. Lane was not one of the well-known figures in nineteenth century medical history who contributed to the development of modern biomedicine; rather, he developed and promoted his own theory of ‘hygienic medicine,’ which was one of the most explicit attempts in the second half of the century to revive the declining medical philosophy of the holistic approach to the body and disease enshrined in the classical concept of hygiene. The MD thesis he submitted at the Medical School of Edinburgh was one of his earliest published medical works that presents such a holistic vision of medical philosophy.
Lane’s thesis deals with three aspects of hospital reforms (fiscal, educational and hygienic) through three specific issues (governmental roles in voluntary hospitals, the medical school’s thesis exaction policy, and the establishment of the hygienic hospital). He argued for governmental support for local public medical institutions but opposed the idea of state control. Likewise, he criticised the compulsory exaction of a thesis for graduation but agreed with the school policy of medical elitism. Lane’s approach to hospital hygiene was distant both from that employed in the urban local hospitals and from that concretised by many hospital reformers, including Nightingale. I attempt to contextualize his medical view within the medical discourses of the time principally through the three aspects of hygiene (public, medical and personal). Lane’s view was closely related to his own inclination towards the personal aspect of hygiene in contrast to the ever-enlarging domain of public hygiene at the time.
Hospital hygiene for Lane was neither merely the provision of cleanliness nor the elimination of poverty. His Romantic naturalist view of hygiene and disease led him to focus on restoring a hygienic way of living for individual patients and reformulating the hospital as a place for such a restoration.
Lane’s view of hospital reforms in the thesis not only presents the earliest stage of the ‘holistic’ vision of his medical philosophy but also reveals the gap between the holistic and reductionist approaches to hygiene, indicating that each of these approaches, based respectively on the classical and modern conceptions of hygiene, was developing throughout the century.
|
|
|
KEYWORD
|
|
|
Hospital reform, hospital hygiene, Edward W, Lane, holistic vision, public hygiene
|
|
|
FullTexts / Linksout information
|
|
|
|
|
|
Listed journal information
|
|
|
|
|