Molecular politics: developing American and British regulatory policy for genetic engineering, 1972–1982
By J. Turney. 1996
health administration and legislation between 1770 and 1870, drawing attention simultaneously to the interests of both the state and the nascent medical profession in this area. As for the state, he sees an interest in health care and control with the aim of increasing economic, political, and military power in the tradition of Enlightenment cameralism. As for the doctors, he develops the thesis that their involvement in sanitary reform was a strategy to acquire state-sanctioned professional autonomy and the status of sole experts in questions of health. Accordingly, several issues relevant to medical professionalization are highlighted: the competition by non-academic healers (so-called Kurpffuscherei); the problem of fraudulent advertising; the striving for abolition of the dual educational system for surgeons and medical doctors, and the creation of a unified profession, which was eventually achieved with a ministerial decree in 1872 (twenty years later than in Prussia). A link between this so-called "surgeons question" (Chirurgenfrage) and Austrian sanitary reform is documented by efforts of organized doctors in the late 1860s to exclude surgeons from admission to public health and forensic services. Burg's central thesis of a co-operation between the state and the medical profession each to its own benefit-is substantiated from relevant primary sources, such as manuals for public health and medical administration, publications on sanitary reform and policies of doctors' societies, and articles from the early medical periodicals in Austria. His study also provides valuable insights into the responsibilities of Austrian public health officers and sanitary committees at different administrative levels, which extended to general hygiene, action in epidemic and epizootic diseases, and control of health personnel and hospitals. It is therefore a useful contribution both to the historiography of medical professionalization and of public health.
Subfields: Social Sciences & Humanities
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Citations in the corpus
- Swimming Against the Current: The Rise of a Hidden Developmental State in the United States (2008, background): “In 1977, Herbert Boyer’s team at UCSF successfully created a new organism designed to produce a particular protein—somatostatin.(24) Well before Boyer’s important achievement, the biotechnology gold rush was underway.”
- Systemic risks of genetically modified crops: the need for new approaches to risk assessment (2011, methodology): “COGEM: Socio-economic aspects of GMOs.”