Dr Michael Brown (Senior Lecturer at Roehampton University) came to NLCS to give an engaging talk on the transformation of medicine from 1780-1880 at History Society on Tuesday 15th November.
He gave an interesting overview of how the exploration of ideas about the body and the medical profession evolved between 1780 and 1880. This included the works of many notable practitioners of medicine such as Michael Brown and John Hunter but also chemists such as Louis Pasteur and how their work came to shape medicine as we know it today.
We were also shown a comparison of English medical practices where practitioners were generally trained at Oxbridge through book reading and were very humane, whereas, French medical practitioners were considered more controversial with their methods of medical research such as Claude Bernard who experimented on living dogs to find out how the nervous system worked. This causes much outrage and even his wife divorced him, but nonetheless he continued his research.
Later, the University of Edinburgh was opened to rival Oxbridge as it gave its pupils the chance to experiment more with medicine rather than just read. However, the graduates from Edinburgh University weren't allowed into the Royal College of Physicians as they weren't educated at Oxbridge which showed the social controversies in the history of medicine.
It was a very engaging talk about the evolution of medicine through history and the effect this all had on medicine today and proved to be an interesting topic for historians but potential medics alike.
By Pernia Price, Yr 12
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