The history of orthodox biomedicine in the twentieth century is usually depicted as one of icreasing reductionism and dependence on laboratory sciences and technology. Holism today is commonly regarded as an alternative to regular healing and a reaction to it. In fact, in the interwar years, clinicians and basic scientists in Europe and North America responded to what they perceived as the increasing reductionism, routinizing and mechanization of the biomedical sciences and clinical practice by creating holistic models of the body's activities and models of healing based the whole, individual sufferer. Holistic responses were also visible in public health and epidemiology. The essays collected here explore this previously neglected area. They show how the holistic turn in orthodox medicine in the interwar years was a reaction to the scietific reductionism and the specialization and division of labor and medicine. In addition, all show how this movement was part of a more general response to modernity itself, political, idealogical and cultural upheaval of the years between the wars.

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George Weisz is a professor of social studies and medicine and Cotton-Hannah Chair for the History of Medicine at McGill University in Quebec. He is author and editor of several books, including Divide and Conquer: A Comparative History of Medical Specialization, and co-editor of Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920-1950 and Body Counts: Medical Quantification in Historical and Sociological Perspectives.

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....This is an excellent and stimulating volume, and well worth reading in it's entirety. It would be facile and unsatisfactory to review it chapter by chapter. The papers cover a vast range of medical disciplines in four countries (Britain, Germany, France, and the United States) over half a century; all of them are well written, and very little feels redundant or out of place.IULLITEN OF HISTORICAL MEDICINE

"...this excellent collection of essays merits careful attention from all those interested in the evolution of 20th century medicine."--The Journal of the American Medical Association A totally valid and very helpful message in this book is insistence and undrestanding the patients as a person and the recognition that the "parts" as well as "the whole" are powerfully influenced in an integrative fashion by interpersonal and social experience.--volume 35 No.2 of Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science.