ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Unanimity and Exclusion: Contested Authority at the 1881 International Medical Congress

• In Event: Medical Professionalization and Its Histories

English Abstract

In 1881, the seventh International Medical Congress (IMC) in London became the arena in which two developments—usually treated separately—were structurally linked: the exclusion of qualified women physicians and the physiologists' effort to secure unanimous approval of resolutions for the Secretary of State. The Congress brought together multiple professional worlds and revealed a contested scientific landscape in which authority had to be actively produced.
The Association of Registered Medical Women drafted a petition protesting their exclusion, yet the organisational record is silent: no correspondence, printing costs, or logistical preparation appears in the minute book. The protest reached the organisers only days before the opening, and newspapers even disagreed about who received it, underscoring the unusual informality of the submission process.
At the final general meeting, President Sir James Paget warned, before the vote, that dissenters would have their names recorded —a procedural threat revealing the weight attached to unanimity. Once unanimously adopted, the physiological resolution on animal experimentation was sent to the Secretary of State, accompanied by a note offering explanations upon request.
Both the women's petition and the physiological memorial disappeared from the archives. Paradoxically, they survive only as textual attestations in the Transactions: the women's protest through a note attached to Rule II, and the physiological memorial through the editor's preface describing its submission.
Reconstructing these processes, this paper argues that the 1881 IMC marked a pivotal moment when physiological authority was consolidated through the management of unanimity and the suppression of dissent, illuminating the plural and contested worlds of late nineteenth-century medical science.

Author

• MARIKO OGAWA, professor emerita