Transformation and tradition in the sciences. Essays in honor of I.Bernard Cohen

the city to mark the sesquicentennial anniversary of its inception as the Medical College of Louisiana in 1834, Professor Duffy was the obvious choice as its author. A history of any American medical school with old roots can be useful as a case study ofhow nineteenth-century proprietary schools with tiny, part-time faculties were transformed into massive, university-based centres for medical research and teaching. But even for the historian who does not particularly care about Tulane, that medical school holds special interest. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, its flourishing condition was bound in part to the aggressive demands of southern nationalists for a distinctively southern medicine. The shaping of medical education by politics was also stark after the Civil War during Reconstruction, and during the reign of the demagogue Huey Long in the 1920s and 1930s. Further, from its start, the school had a symbiotic relationship with the Charity Hospital, one of the country's largest, and was a centre for studying tropical diseases on American soil. Tulane was also among the few schools in the South that Abraham Flexner deemed in his 1910 report to be worth salvaging, and is now one of the region's leading schools. Yet those directing the medical centre's course have persistently been troubled by the difficulties involved in reconciling its national reputation and regional identification. The author mentions all these topics. But, by and large, he declines to explore any of them in depth, and thereby to give broader import to what remains a study of substantially parochial interest. Determined to give a balanced account of the institution the banal along with the extraordinary too often he fails to exploit its singularities. Racial integration at Tulane's medical school (the first black student was admitted in 1963), for example, receives scarcely more than twice the space allotted to medical students' participation in college football. Indeed, the relationship of the school to New Orleans's large population of Blacks is scarcely mentioned for the period before the 1950s. Perhaps, though, a photograph the author uses to illustrate an anatomy class at the school in 1890s makes up for the relative neglect in the text. In the photograph, fourteen white dissectors crowd around tables occupied by two black corpses. Notwithstanding its limitations, the book Duffy has produced is an able narrative history, solidly grounded in archival records, of one institution.