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Schools Of Rivals: Physicians, Fights, And Reform In Nineteenth-Century, Southern Medical Education, Laura Elizabeth Smith

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While the professionalization of medicine in the nineteenth century hinged on community trust, faculty at Southern medical schools hurt their own reputations with their proprietary schools, their public rivalries, and their competition for clinical material and cadavers. Attempts to regulate medical schools also became fodder for doctors to slander each other, all arguing that their methodologies and their schools were superior. This fierce competition resulted from the constant need to lure in more students to ensure these schools’ survival, but it hurt the reputation of doctors as a whole, convincing the public that one doctor seemed just as incompetent and …