Presentation (2 December 2016)

PG X-change Interdisciplinary Seminar 

Time: Fri 2 Dec 2016 at 12.00-14.00
Venue: C5 Seminar Room, Bute Building, St Andrews

The Chair: Kirsty Holstead, PhD student in the School of Management. 

The speakers:

1. ‘“Of with you”, I said to my assembled selves.’: The multiplicity of the informants’ selves: theoretical approaches

Eleni Kotsira, Department of Social Anthropology

2. The Hygienic Medicine of E. W. Lane and its Place in Late Nineteenth Century Britain 

Min Bae, School of History

3. Change not loss: No systematic change in assemblage capacity
Faith Jones, School of Biology

Handout text

Title: E.W. Lane’s Hygienic Medicine and its Place in Late Nineteenth Century British Medicine

 

Min Bae (PhD student, Modern History)

 

 

Hygienic medicine was not a fixed idea nor was it widely accepted in the late nineteenth century. However, Lane’s medical thoughts presented certain elements to think about medicine and health. Ultimately, he wanted to establish a new system of the theory and practice of medicine under the name of hygienic medicine. Lane’s major book, Hydropathy: or Hygienic Medicine (1859) showed a critical attitude against the prevailing therapeutic ideas of the medical profession, such as bloodletting or excessive medication. However, it may not be possible to clearly address how Lane tried to combine the two different areas of hygiene and medicine. For Lane, the simplest comparative notion about hygiene and hygienic medicine would be that hygiene is more focused on preventing disease whereas hygienic medicine is more focused on curing disease.

 

From ancient times, hygiene has meant managing life. However, throughout the nineteenth century there were important changes in the concept of hygiene, and hygiene became separated into two distinct areas: personal hygiene and public hygiene.

 

The essential concept of personal hygiene - the six non-naturals - continued to be a key source. on the other hand, the most visible progress in hygiene of the nineteenth century was concentrated on environmental public hygiene policies represented by sanitary systems.

 

The territories of public and personal hygiene were often blurry when it came to the wider social and cultural aspects, not least because hygiene was inseparable from morality or purity. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century, medicine was becoming more and more associated with public and scientific hygiene, losing its connection to philosophical and personal hygiene.

 

Among a number of medical doctors in the nineteenth century who held heterodox views, a few of them were trying to restore the old tradition of personal hygiene along with its connection to ‘modern’ public hygiene and also to the newly developing scientific medicine. Lane was such a case.

 

The key ideas of his medical thoughts included the nature cure philosophy and the emphasis on individual responsibility for health. The nature cure philosophy was more associated with heterodox healing systems of the nineteenth century, especially hydropathy in the mid-nineteenth century and naturopathy in the early twentieth century.

 

The historical meanings of Lane’s hygienic medicine are that first, it gives us a specific image of the new relationship between hygiene and medicine in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Lane tried to overcome the Greek tradition of hygienic medicine, and overcome the limitations of hydropathy. He tried to show how hygiene could be a successful means to achieve the ultimate aim of medicine, which he regarded as the maintenance of health, not just the elimination of disease. Second, his hygienic medicine gives us a more concrete picture of the tensions between medical orthodoxy and its deviants within the medical profession in the competitive medical market of the late nineteenth century.