Collective Investigation

“The movement for collective investigation, which sought to harvest the experiences of general practitioners for medical science, demonstrates how uninterested such practitioners were in the scientific and social aspiration articulated by medical elites (Marks II, 148). In Britain, “collective investigation failed to bridge the profound gaps between the world of the hungry, scrabbling practitioners and that of the inquiring, flourishing consultant” (164). In the U.S., “the American history of collective investigation is largely a story about the difficulties of realizing medical community. . . . Therapeutic knowledge was a form of private property, jealously guarded. Only where practitioners saw a material advantage from publicity did they participate, as in Parke, Davis’s Therapeutic Gazette” (165).