If Blackwood's helped to generate a recuperative medical humanism in the first half of the nineteenth century, what was its legacy? This ‘Coda’ turns to the fin de siècle to trace some key examples of a resurgence of the magazine's mode of medical humanism at a time of perceived crisis for the medical profession, when many began ‘to worry that the transformation of medicine into a science, as well as the epistemological and technical successes of the new sciences, may have been bought at too great a price’.

From the mid-nineteenth century, a series of major medicoscientifi c breakthroughs – most notably in anaesthetics, antiseptics, and germ theory (with all but the last coming from Scotland) – came to symbolise modern medical progress and the rise of a more ‘scientific’ medicine. The well-known shift traced by N. D. Jewson, from the bedside medicine of the eighteenth century to the hospital medicine of the post-revolutionary period, had moved forward to the era of laboratory-based medicine, wherein new sciences such as experimental physiology and bacteriology began increasingly to inform clinical medicine. According to Jewson, this ‘represented a shift from a person orientated toward an object orientated cosmology’, as laboratory-based medicine enabled the medical practitioner ‘to conceptualize the sick-man as a material thing to be analysed, and disease as a physico-chemical process to be explained according to the blind inexorable laws of natural science’. In tandem with this, by the end of the century, even The Lancet began to express fears that ‘a too exclusive professionalism was growing up among us’ and that the ‘“Doctor” of to-day was not quite so broadly cultured as physicians of the older school were wont to be’.

For Tabitha Sparks, Arthur Conan Doyle's collection of tales Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life (1894) encapsulates the ‘scientization of the doctor’ and the medical profession's perceived detachment from what Moironce termed the ‘feeling of common humanity’. According to Sparks, this detachment is represented by ‘the formal demise of the marriage plot’ – fictional doctors no longer experience the traditional narrative resolution of marital bliss by the end of the nineteenth century.