Abstract
‘Medicine in the laboratory’ explores how medicine became a more scientific field, moving away from its reliance upon the experience of doctors towards results obtained by experiment in the laboratory. This process was most apparent during the nineteenth century, with breakthroughs such as cell theory in the 1830s, which became the foundation stone of modern medical science and biology, and Louis Pasteur's hugely important germ theory of disease, in the latter half of the century. Practical innovations, such as antiseptics and anaesthesia also proved revolutionary, with a lasting impact on modern surgery.
