This book examines the Rockefeller Foundation's attempts to introduce
the laboratory sciences, particularly biochemistry, into the Edinburgh
medical world of the 1920s.
In the first half of the twentieth century, reformers attempted to use
the knowledge and practices of the laboratory sciences to radically
transform medicine. Change was to be effected through medicine's major
institutions; hospitals were to be turned into businesses and united to
university-based medical schools. American ideas and money were major
movers of these reforms. The Rockefeller Foundation supported these
changes worldwide. reform, however, wasnot always welcomed. In Britain
many old hospitals and medical schools stood by their educational and
healing traditions. Further, American ideals were often seen as part of
a larger transatlantic threat to British ways of life. In Edinburgh,
targeted by reformers as an important center for training doctors for
the empire, reform was resisted on the grounds that the city had sound
methods of education and patient care matured over time. This resistance
waspart of an anxiety about a wholesale invasion by American culture
that was seen to be destroying Edinburgh's cherished values and
traditions. These latter in turn were seen to stem from a distinct
Scottish way of life. This bookexamines this culture clash through
attempts to introduce the laboratory sciences, particularly
biochemistry, into the Edinburgh medical world of the 1920s.
Christopher Lawrence is Professor of the History of Medicine at the
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College
London. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
