ABSTRACT
Since the 1960s, academic historians have developed a more complex account of the development of medical ideas, identifying a series of significant shifts in medical theory and setting the production of ideas within their intellectual, social, political and institutional contexts to explain why they emerged at particular times and specific places. A useful framework for this development of medical ideas is provided by the sociologist Nicholas Jewson. In the nineteenth century, 'hospital medicine' dominated: disease was located in specific parts of the body and doctors no longer saw a 'sickman' but a diseased lung or heart, to be scrutinised through physical examination. By the end of the nineteenth century, 'laboratory medicine' located disease within cells and tissues, to be analysed through tests conducted in the laboratory. In the early twentieth century, many practitioners continued to favour the older clinical art, which used the techniques of both bedside and hospital medicine to identify disease through a range of signs.
