关键词:
HISTORY of medical research
NONFICTION
摘要:
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by: The Imperial Laboratory: Experimental Physiology and Clinical Medicine in Post-Crimean Russia Mary Schaeffer Conroy, Ph.D. Galina Kichigina. The Imperial Laboratory: Experimental Physiology and Clinical Medicine in Post-Crimean Russia. Amsterdam, New York, Editions Rodopi (The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine), 2009. 374 pp., €76. This is a fascinating, well-written story of how empirical medicine— that which relied on observation of symptoms, questioning the patient, and application of remedies derived by trial and error—was superseded during the nineteenth century by medicine based on increasingly accurate knowledge of the physiology, chemistry, and mechanics of the body acquired through vivisection and analysis using microscopes, test tubes, and other apparatus in specially outfitted laboratories—a process that paralleled and relied on discoveries in the physical sciences. Although the subtitle suggests discussion of experimental physiology and clinical medicine in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century, the book wisely begins in the century’s first half, focuses on research, and is broadly European in scope. This could have been a tedious, encyclopedic survey of scientific developments. However, steeped in the scientific content, fluent in French, German, and Russian, and with a brisk English writing style, Kichigina unreels a panoramic and dynamic drama of scientists and scientific developments in France, various German states, and the Austrian Empire; Russian scientists’ experiments in the foreign laboratories; and the establishment of laboratories in various parts of the Russian Empire. She views German scientist Carl Ludwig’s mechanistic explanation of blood pressure, venous pressure, and renal filtration in the early 1840s—a [End Page 504] process approximating “electrical mechanics, telegraphy and ballistics” and employing an apparatus of his own “pa