Under the Microscope

Abstract

The rise of laboratory medicine and developing understandings of bacteriology and pathology fundamentally altered the way that doctors thought about, diagnosed and treated venereal diseases. This chapter reveals how developments in laboratory-based research influenced the trajectory of venereological knowledge and practice among medical elites and, as far as possible, among general practitioners before the First World War. It examines the accessibility of the diagnostic and therapeutic developments of vaccine therapy, salvarsan and the Wassermann reaction. In so doing this chapter demonstrates the place of venereal diseases within wider frameworks of medical knowledge and practice, and the extent to which new laboratory-based knowledge claims permeated day-to-day clinical practice.