Physiological therapy

“But a gap opened toward the end of the nineteenth century between a patient’s experience of medical treatment and the treatment’s intended effects. The targets sought out by newer twentieth-century therapeutics often had little connection to their immediately perceptible effects (Crenner II, 102). . . . What changed late in the nineteenth century was the availability of routine methods for extracting information about physiological effects: with blood counts and homoglobinometry, chemical urinalysis, microscopy, serology, and x-rays. . . . Drug therapy increasingly sought to produce interior changes in a patient’s body that were as concrete as surgical effects (103). . . . Feeling better was not accurate evidence of therapeutic effect. . . . [Whereas] A blood test, like an appendix on a napkin, showed both the hidden target of the treatment and its demonstrable therapeutic effects” (105). . . . Physiological therapeutics picked out interior targets for medical therapy in a manner that made a previously reliance on the patient’s perception of therapy seem less legitimate” (109).