Pernicious anemia

The period was marked by “professional tensions and commitments concerning the hierarchy among specialties [abdominal surgeons, hematologists, gastroenterologists, neurologists] . . . The disease possessed a clinically fragmented organic identity that reinforced specialization and the search for organic causation . . . specialists brought their preferred order to a fragmented organic and therapeutic situation. How they thought about disease depended upon technologies deployed within the hospital and on the social relations of hospital practice )Wailoo I, 161).