Medical malpractice in nineteenth-century America: origins and legacy

King devotes four chapters to those physicians who struggled to make sense out of the bewildering phenomena of febrile diseases so prevalent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He examines the writings of William Cullen, Benjamin Rush, Henry Clutterbuck, Fran9ois Broussais, Charles Caldwell, John Armstrong, Nathan Smith and many others. A strength of these chapters is King's attention to nuances of confusion, insight, or both, as these physicians tried to characterize and differentiate the essential fevers, both continued and intermittent. In the remaining chapters, King depicts the influences of microscopy, bacteriology, and experimentation in shaping the emergence of late nineteenth-century scientific medicine. A dominant theme in all chapters is the slowness of scientific transformation, with a step backward here, a step foward there. Except for the ruminations of relatively obscure nineteenth-century authors about the nature of fevers, there is little that is new in this book. It is replete with the viewpoints and characteristics of the author's previous books. It should appeal to those who have an interest in the history of pathology, who want more examples of rationalist-empiricist controversies, and who enjoy the bio-bibliographical and exegetical style of King's writing.