ABSTRACT

The life-and-times biography has provided inspiration for the PhD dissertation carried out at Medicinsk Museion, University of Copenhagen. Its main object of study is the physician Ole Bang (1788-1877) and the process of change in Danish medical science in the first half of the nineteenth century. The period is commonly perceived as marking the beginnings of a `modern' medicine, and the decline of a medical tradition that has its roots in the hippocratic teachings. The dissertation is based on both published and unpublished sources.

Ole Bang presented his system of medicine in Observationes Medicae (1822). It is interpreted as a reaction against late eighteenth century medicine, its theoretical systems and rigid disease classifications. Instead Bang praised Hippocrates, Francis Bacon and Thomas Sydenham. Bang described the `healing power of nature' in 24 medical sentences, which, according to Bang, captured the quintessence of human disease. Human lifestyle and the changing atmospheric conditions also played an important role in his medical thinking. Bang was also influenced by the Romantic Movement and published his medical system in a poem.

The dissertation analyses the art of medicine on the basis of Bang's published case stories. His physical examination was cursory. Instead, he was very interested in bodily discharges, which he viewed as healing processes and an ideal for the therapeutic procedures of the doctor. For that reason Bang praised drugs such as emetics, cathartics, sudorifics and venesection.

Typhus fever, a main issue for Ole Bang, is the starting point of an investigation of continuity and change in Danish medicine from 1820 to 1860. It shows that antique humoral pathology was integrated with localistic nineteenth century pathological anatomy in the same theory of typhus fever. It also shows that the therapeutic procedures used in typhus fever did not change noticeably during the period under examination. It is argued that the process of change in Danish medicine in the period, both on a theoretical level and a practical level, is not a story of revolution or disruption, as commonly told in the history of Danish medicine - it is in fact hard to point out a decade, in which `modern' medicine arrived in Denmark.

The project contributes to the general understanding of the period, since the story of the development of medicine in nineteenth century Denmark mainly has been a narrative based on historical figures and themes later on labelled as `modern'. Using a historical person such as Bang makes it possible to tell another history of Danish medicine in the early nineteenth century. Bang was interested in French medicine for a period, but he also paid attention to, for example, meteorological observations, because he and other Danish physicians tried to modernise Hippocratic medicine.