ABSTRACT
Western medicine has been characterized by long-standing tension between universalism and specificity. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, the biomedical imaginary was defined not by images and metaphors of personalization, but by the possibilities for the universalization and standardization of medical knowledge and interventions. Physicians conceptualized of the human person as being in a state of continual adjustment and readjustment to her or his environment, to the climate and changing seasons, and to the nature of her or his social habits and work. The states of health and disease were understood as consequences of the body being in equilibrium or disequilibrium with its surrounding environment, internal processes, and stages of development Bacteriologists, through their work on germ theory beginning in the 1860s, advanced new ways of understanding the causes of infectious disease, identifying the microorganisms involved. The changes in ideas and practices of therapy and disease diagnosis were contested by some clinical practitioners, by doctors in elite practice in Britain.
