1. For a general review, see John Harley Warner, “Physiology,” in The Education of American Physicians, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980). The best work on the history of American medical education is Kenneth Ludmerer, Learning to Heal (New York: Basic, 1985). For a critical evaluation of recent historiography see Daniel M. Fox, “The New Historiography of American Medical Education,” Hist. Educ. Q. 26 (1986): 117–124.
2. For a representative essay, see Carl J. Wiggers, “The Interrelations of Physiology and Internal Medicine,” J. Am. Med. Assoc. 91 (1928): 270–274. Gerald L. Geison discusses the push for physiology in “Divided We Stand: Physiologists and Clinicians in the American Context,” in The Therapeutic Revolution, ed. Morris J. Vogel and Charles E. Rosenberg ( Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1979 ).
3. Quoted by Eugene F. DuBois in “Fifty Years of Physiology in America: A Letter to the Editor,” in The Excitement and Fascination of Science (Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews, 1965), p. 86. Another noted physiologist, Paul F. Cranefield, was somewhat less certain of physiology’s impact on medicine in “Microscopic Physiology Since 1908, ” Bull. Hist. Med. 33 (1959): 275.
4. This ideal has been largely defined by the Annales school. See Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977 ).
5. For a review of recent historical analysis of medical science see Warner, “Science in Medicine,” Osiris 1 (1985): 37–58.