| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Profound Science and Elegant Literature: Imagining Doctors in Nineteenth-Century America. By Stephanie P. Browner. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 304 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8122-3825-7.)
Stephanie P. Browner charts the emergence of American medicine as a respected profession in the nineteenth century, overlaying this historical narrative with an analysis of fiction's part in shaping the triumph of "regular" medicine over folk healing. Imaginative writing offered a "rich, detailed record of anxieties raised and assuaged by regulars' efforts to professionalize and to claim exclusive somatic authority" (p. 3). These anxieties revolved around class mobility and the character transformations effected by scientific training.	1
Browner begins with a fast-paced introduction to nineteenth-century notions of scientific practice and professionalism before she moves to chapter 1, which tells the story of the discovery of ether in 1846 and its effect in raising ethical, professional, political, and economic dilemmas central to debates about medical authority at midcentury. To this end Browner compares William T. G. Morton, the untrained dentist who demonstrated the use of ether in surgery, to the elite Henry Bigelow, who used Morton's story to argue for the importance of the trained doctor and his position "outside and above the profit-driven world" Morton inhabited (p. 16).	. . .

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