No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought

Abstract

Charles Rosenberg is one of the most sensitive present-day historians of American medicine. In this book, his essays on the development of biomedical sciences and scientists are included with a smaller group of essays on the more general social history of American science. With one exception, they have all been published earlier. Medical and scientific ideas, Rosenberg maintains, interacted with the changing cultural and social environment and institutions in definite and important ways. In the mid-19th century, hereditarian beliefs were important clinically and resonated with "optimism and confident manipulativeness." Half a century later, hereditarianism played into new social problems and programs and helped justify pessimism. Class, sex, ethnicity, and religious attitudes, too, shaped American medicine and medical science but not always in obvious ways. Who would have thought that pietistic religious upbringing was an important factor both in launching the American public health movement and in fostering the best in