Against the Spirit of System

"Against the Spirit of the System provides the best view yet of a lost medical culture... It is enormously important for anyone seeking to understand either nineteenth-century medical life in America, or how culture and memory come to be embedded in physicians' careers."

"In this masterful description of what students encountered in Paris and how it subsequently affected medicine in American, John Warner has given us a new and far richer view of Parisian medicine of the early nineteenth century than we have heretofore had."

"John Harley Warner has produced a book which is never dull and always thought-provoking in the fields of ethics, medicine, and history. His scholarship and research is always relevant and the attention to detail is reminiscent of Ellman's biography of Oscar Wilde... It was a project that needed to be done and has been done well."

"John Harley Warner has written a magisterial book. In examining how nearly a century of American physicians remembered and reconstructed their experiences studying medicine in Paris, Warner explains how Americans invented and reinvented their own profession, shaped and expressed their values, and even developed their personal identities... This is a work of enormous ambition, and it is enormously successful... a superb medical history."

"John Harley Warner knows more about the travels of nineteenth century Americans to medical Paris than any other historian... [His] book is a stimulating example of fresh archival research that opens new windows on an important period on American medicine. It certainly stimulated me to think again about previous work on this subject."

"The book's force derives from its combination of detailed and evocative prosopography with a rigorously articulated argument about how 'Paris-returned' physicians retrospectively constructed Paris medicine to give meaning to their French sojourn in the context of American culture and society."

"This is an extremely impressive historical narrative. Not only does Warner recount in great detail the variety of experiences, meanings, and uses of French medicine to American physicians in the nineteenth century, but in providing a fine grained discursive analysis of orthodox American medicine's process of professionalization, he also showcases an outstanding model of historical methodology."

"Warner offers not only a fresh interpretation of American émigré medical education but also an analytic method that others should consider as they reread the medical narratives that have informed historians' understanding of the rise of American professionalization and specialization."

"Warner writes well, and the book is full of fascinating details and long quotes from actual letter and diaries written by Americans who made the trip to Paris. Like all good history, it says as much about the present as about the past."

"Warner's remarkably thorough research has uncovered invaluable personal papers and diaries of American physicians who studies in Paris. In Warner's hands, these materials eloquently recreate the texture of the life of a medical student in early-nineteenth-century Paris."

"Warner's richly satisfying book will be indispensable to anyone interested in the history of American medicine of in the historical meanings of cultural migration."

"The appearance of John Harley Warner's marvelous Against the Spirit of System in paperback is a boon to scholars interested in such questions."

"Outstanding storytelling, scholarly use of primary sources, and selfless offerings of new and interesting research projects."