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Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Advance Access published online on April 8, 2009
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrp008
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Necessary Torture? Vivisection, Suffragette Force-Feeding, and Responses to Scientific Medicine in Britain c. 1870–1920

Ian Miller*

Correspondence: * Ian Miller, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Brunswick Street, Manchester, M13 9PL. Email: ianmiller_2004{at}yahoo.co.uk.


  Abstract

One of the primary aims of late nineteenth-century laboratory experimentation was to ground understandings of illness and disease within new regimes of science. It was also hoped that clinical practice would become increasingly complemented by discoveries and technologies accrued from emergent forms of modern medical enquiry, and that, ultimately, this would lead to improved diagnostic and therapeutic procedures that could be applied to a wide variety of medical complaints. This met with resistance in Britain. So far, analyses of the British reception to forms of scientific medicine have focused on a science versus intuition dichotomy. This article aims to address other aspects intertwined in the debate through an exploration of alternative representations of the medical scientist available and the relation of this to perceptions of clinical practice. Using new technologies of the stomach as a case study, I shall examine how physiologists approached digestion in the laboratory, the responses of antivivisectionists to this, the application of gastric innovations at the clinical level, and the impact of the use of the stomach tube in the suffragette force-feeding controversy.

Key Words: forcible feeding • stomach tube • vivisection • laboratory medicine • suffragettes • digestion


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