Bioengineering and technology in medical research and medical diagnostics: history and ethics during the 19th and 20th centuries
The integration of engineering and technology into medical research and clinical practice has always been considered critically. This holds true even for technologies and engineering concepts, which today represent general routine procedures. Like other techniques these methods met with scepticism and rejection during the 19th century. The basic prerequisite for the introduction of technical and engineering concepts and procedures in medical research and health care was the transition from humoral-pathological to iatromechanical concepts. This transition was accompanied by a separation of disease terms from diseased subjects. The establishment of laboratories and modern hospitals created the possibility of testing technical procedures professionally in everyday life, whereby the checking of instrumentally determined measurements against pathological-anatomical findings gained special importance. Nevertheless, the integration of technological ideals into the life sciences and into medical practice faced severe criticism. Not least because elements of the medical profession feared that the mechanisation of life and its processes would threaten their status as specialists, as well as the medical view of the “whole person”.
In the project we intend to reconstruct the social networks that were involved in disseminating technological ideals and connecting engineering, biology and medicine. The combined social and conceptual parameters that influenced the diffusion of bioengineering concepts into medical research will be analysed using the rarely investigated case of “technical biology” as it was conceived around 1900. The idea of “abiogenesis” put forward for example by Jacques Loeb and the implementation of bioengineering technologies into clinical practice will be explored.
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Fangerau H: Spinning the Scientific Web: Jacques Loeb (1859-1924) und sein Programm einer internationalen biomedizinischen Grundlagenforschung, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2010
