ABSTRACT
Early nineteenth-century medical texts are superficially similar to our own. Textbook discussions of most diseases include sections with such titles as pathology, etiology, therapy, and prognosis, and the contents may seem readily intelligible to a modern reader. One could surmise that our medical system is part of a continuous tradition extending back through these decades and beyond – that changes have come mostly through the accumulation of facts within a shared framework of fundamental beliefs and objectives (King, 1982, pp. 5-15). However, earlier medical texts contain statements that now seem strange, and these statements sometimes point to fundamental discontinuities separating earlier thinking from our own.
