Paper abstract for presentation

Paper Title: The Hygienic Medicine of E. W. Lane and T. R. Allinson and its Place in the Medical

Market in Late Nineteenth Century Britain

Author’s affiliation: School of History, University of St Andrews

Name of author submitting paper: Min Bae (PhD student in Modern History)

Address : Deans Court, St Andrews, Fife, the United Kingdom, KY16 9QT

Tel: 44 1334 46 2391

Email: mb323@st-andrews.ac.uk

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, individualistic approaches to hygiene were increasingly

displaced by public health approaches. Although doctors inspired by political economy and utilitarian

philosophy joined hygienic reform, medicine was not a subject heavily dealt with in public discourse

on moral reform – which was a mental or spiritual version of hygienic reform – with its symbolic

concept of ‘purity’ at the core of Victorian social identity.

However, doctors were also struggling to find their identity. Medical knowledge was having fierce

disputes on the nature of disease and medical intervention to disease. Two physicians, Lane and

Allinson, published books with similar titles, on ‘hygienic medicine’.

Despite differences in time of activities and opinions, both tried to show how hygiene, in

individualistic and holistic (incorporating mind and body) approaches, could be a successful measure

to achieve the ultimate aim of medicine, which they regarded to be health, not eliminating disease.

The problem was that they were neither established medical academics, nor members of any social

authorities. Rather, the reality was that they were just private practitioners with even a heterodox

view in the medical market, and were sympathetic to, but not very active in, radical ideas of social

reform, such as vegetarianism, anti-vaccination and anti-vivisection.

However, the nature cure philosophy, which their belief in hygiene was based on, was gradually

forming an ‘independent’ philosophical and therapeutic system in the medical market, which was

becoming gradually monopolised by the medical profession, backed by state intervention in the late

nineteenth century.

It seems clear that few medically qualified British men of the time propagated these ideas on

hygiene and nature cure philosophy in such a systematic way, and few historians have investigated

their medical thought seriously.

* to be presented at the Conference on Environment and Health in History (University of Oulu, Finland, 3-4 November 2016)

* Brief biography 

Min Bae used to be a dentist (DDS, Yonsei University; and Master of Clinical Dentistry in clinical orthodontics, Hallym University), but changed his career and has worked as a history teacher at Soongeui Girls' High School, Seoul (BA, Hongik University in History Education). After receiving his second master’s degree (in medical humanities and history of medicine, Seoul National University), he has taken a leave from his school for study (currently a PhD student in Modern History at the University of St Andrews, UK, from October, 2014).

His academic interest areas are medical professionalism, an intellectual history of medicine, and the medical market.