The history of Western medicine chronicles a tension between ideologies of patient care—the holistic Hippocratic view and the specialization view, with a depersonalization of the patient that coincides with the rise of pathologic anatomy in the early modern era.
Although now discredited, the idea that mothers’ behavior is responsible for autism lives on in the social pressure that mothers feel to save their autistic children, at a cost to both the self-blaming parents and people with autism.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(4):353-358. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.4.mhst1-1504.
The Indian Health Service was created within the Department of Health and Human Services to integrate traditional Indian healing with Western biomedicine.
Traditional physicians' garb changed from black to white at the time that antiseptic practices became common in medicine. White coats gained symbolic value, and Arnold P. Gold, MD, instituted annual ceremony for medical students.