Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-06, Section: A, page: 2302.

Supervisor: Frederic L. Holmes.

This is a biography of sir John Scott Burdon Sanderson (1829-1905), who began his career as a Medical Officer of Health in London, went on to do pathological and physiological research, and ended his career as Regius Professor at Oxford. I use his eclectic career as a vehicle for exploring the meaning of science, and more particularly scientific medicine in Victorian Britain. Sanderson was a strenuous advocate of experimental physiology as the true basis of medical practice: the highest activity in a hierarchy of medical sciences. I argue that in the late Victorian period scientific medicine was seen by contemporaries as an array of medical activities based in the physical and chemical sciences. These activities included physiological research, pathological research, using medical technologies like the sphygmograph, chemical analysis of food and water, and sanitarian measures. Practitioners who supported scientific medicine justified their beliefs by drawing on a variety of 'successes'. The term scientific medicine was broadly and ambiguously defined, thus supporters of scientific medicine often quarrelled over specific endeavors. For example Henry Wentworth Acland and John Simon, notable proponents of scientific medicine, did not fully support Burdon Sanderson in his attempts to reform the Oxford medical school.

In the first chapter I place Sanderson's scientific beliefs in the context of Victorian pietism and earnestness. In the second chapter I focus on his career as a research pathologist; he was a successful experimentalist, but deplored the controversy associated with 'the germ theory.' In the third chapter I focus on his physiology research. I argue that his empiricism was an important factor in his inability to create a research school. These chapters together outline Burdon Sanderson's beliefs about scientific medicine; they also underline that although scientific medicine encompassed many diverse activities, the final arbiter of correct practice, be it diagnostic, therapeutic or preventive was to be laboratory experiment. In the fourth chapter I outline Sanderson's experiences at Oxford as Professor of Physiology. The opposition he experienced there was emblematic of the reaction to scientific medicine by practitioners who were unwilling to cede their clinical authority (rooted in class) to the laboratory.