Science and the education of physicians: Sigerist's contribution to American medical reform.

This paper seeks to place Henry E. Sigerist within a generation of American scientists who saw science as an intellectual bulwark against burgeoning fascism and nationalism. It responds to a recent critique of scientific positivism and the medical reform ethos of the 1930s and 1940s. Critics argue that faith in scientific medicine led health activists to choose medical care, guaranteed by insurance, rather than social reform. The paper focuses on the place Sigerist assigned to science in medicine and argues that his embrance of scientific medicine must be qualified by his historical perspective. Sigerist's singular contribution to the dialogue of medical reform came from his projection of an educational prototype that he believed might reconcile science with the imperatives of an industrial society. While embodying much of the spirit of reformers of the 1930s and 1940s, Sigerist also foreshadowed our own.