HPS Talk June 15: British neurology

[ereshefs at ucalgary.ca]

Dr. Stephen Casper, Assistant Professor, History of Science,
Clarkson University

"How Physicians Became Neurologists: The Case of Britain, 1800-2000"

Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Begins at 4:00 PM
Health Sciences Center - Room G500, University of Calgary, Foothills Campus

ABSTRACT:
This presentation describes the specialization of British neurology. 
British neurology emerged in a medical culture philosophically generalist
in its values for medical practice.  For this reason, British physicians
in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were largely opposed to
medical specialization.  Rather than contravening their culture’s
standards, British neurologists embraced “generalism” by claiming that
their specialist knowledge not only conformed to this culture but was its
highest manifestation.  These claims had advantages, but the result was a
conflict in the idioms of medical practice. On one hand, neurologists
produced and reproduced habits and dispositions that articulated and even
underscored their specialty’s differences with medicine.  On the other
hand, they argued that they were general physicians possessing broad
knowledge and sound judgment for the whole of medicine.  Neurology, thus
conceived in Britain, became at once the most elite of generalist
medicine’s many practices.  At the same time, neurology was one of its
most marginal specialties.