What gives scientific medicine its remarkable persuasiveness? Patients and physicians alike might point today to the power of certain spectacular technical procedures. Yet they might wonder equally about how scientific practice originally won acceptance. Technically driven, disease-centered practices put up significant challenges to the daily work of medicine. People who feel terribly ill, for example, may test out as free of disease. Other people will receive treatments whose perceptible actions are only """"""""side-effects,"""""""" and whose therapeutic actions are imperceptible. Present-day medical authority seems to cloak an inherent tension between the scientific understanding of disease and the personal experience of illness. Yet we have not examined the historical setting in which this tension, and the authority to accommodate it, emerged. A Patient's Doctoring is the first book-length work to address this dilemma in its historical context. By exploring the technical practices and their reception by patients within a physician's private medical office A Patient's Doctoring will explore the tensions between disease and illness, as they were expressed outside of the controlled setting of the hospital during this crucial period. The physician in question, Richard Cabot of Boston, was among a vanguard of physicians who were taking scientific values and techniques into office practice. Cabot was also both an early advocate and formative critic of a rigorous, disease-model of medical practice. An office like Cabot's occupied an important transitional site in the public's encounter with scientific medical authority: halfway between convalescence in the nineteenth-century home and technical scrutiny in the twentieth-century hospital. The archives of this office, with their extensive collection of patient correspondence, provide a view into early twentieth-century medicine, balancing its technical detail against the responses of the people who sought out and subjected themselves to its workings. A Patient's Doctoring uses these archives to explore the tensions in scientific medical practice, as they were deployed and negotiated among the patients of a single private clinic.
