Physiology (experimental) and medicine

“By the end of the [19th] century, as physiologists and physicians had developed distinct goals, their instruments reflected different requirements. This conflict over purpose had been evident to those who attempted to apply the new instrumentation to medicine even in the 1870s. In the 1880s and 1890s, physiologists had become increasingly concerned with their own questions, and the disjunction between pure and applied experimental medicine had become more apparent. By the time of [William] Porter’s push for experimental physiology, physiology had become a discipline to train the mind in exact reasoning rather than the royal road to either diagnostic precision or effective therapy. By 1900, physiology as a discipline had become removed from clinical medicine, even though physiology as an intellectual pursuit was becoming intimately tied to clinical concerns [Borell, 310-11] . . . the eventually successful campaign for the separation of physiology from anatomy and medicine in the nineteenth century was being followed by a reconsideration at the turn of the twentieth century of the mutual benefits enjoyed to each intersecting discipline. Physiology itself was about to be threatened by the separation from its domain of fields like biochemistry and endocrinology. Moreover, physiologists were beginning to discover that the more interesting problems yet to be solved lay in the common ground between clinical medicine, experimental physiology, and physiological chemistry” [313].