ABSTRACT
While the interactions between laboratory research and the practice of medicine have been an abiding interest for both historians of science and of medicine, the development of routine laboratory techniques used for diagnostic and monitoring purposes has received relatively little attention (but see Keele, 1963; Reiser, 1978; Büttner, 1983). Historians of science tend to focus on the research laboratory and often take the clinical applications of biomedical research pretty much for granted; historians of medicine who focus on the medical practices, pay relatively little attention to the processes by which the techniques used by the physicians are developed in the laboratories and clinics. And yet, the development of laboratory-for example chemical-methods and techniques which are to be used in the clinical practice is a complex process shaped not only by the available biomedical knowledge and the current medical practice, but also by the changing institutional and intellectual relations among research laboratories, clinical laboratories, and the bedside.
