“A General Expression of Opinion from Practicing Physicians”: Collective Investigation in the United States, 1880-1890

• In Event: Case Notes: Comparative Histories of Health and Medicine

English Abstract

In 1880 the British Medical Association called upon its members to gather together to collect and collate the vast amount of clinical data that failed to find its way into the books and journals of the profession. The movement thus proposed---what would come to be called collective investigation---involved the production of cards formatted to document clinical encounters with specific diseases, the circulation of these cards among tens of thousands of medical men, and the statistical analysis of the results. While collective investigation was a product of England, it came to be practiced around the world. This paper addresses the question of how collective investigation became a global phenomenon, focusing specifically on its history in the United States. Though the British Medical Association had imagined that collective investigation could be readily transferred across the Atlantic and practiced at the national level—using cards formatted identically to those in England—the limited political power possessed by the American Medical Association precluded this. While collective investigation was ultimately adopted by numerous state medical associations, it was adopted as well by a range of other healers, for whom it offered a way to construct and legitimate novel medical publics. Far from a process of diffusion, the movement of collective investigation from London to Chicago depended upon an array of actors and involved fundamental changes both to the practice of collective investigation and to the individuals and institutions who practiced it.

Author

• Alexander Thomas Moffett, The University of Chicago