The Laboratory as Business: Sir Almroth Wright's Vaccine Programme and the Construction of Penicillin
secondary literature · 1992
LINK
SUMMARY
Chen's 1992 chapter is the modern historiographic study of Sir Almroth Wright's Inoculation Department at St Mary's Hospital, London, and is cited as the principal independent corroboration of Wootton's reading of Wright's commercial vaccine business as the type-specimen of laboratory-based elite quackery built around a spurious biomarker (the opsonin index). Wootton (2006, pp. 240 to 244) draws on Chen for the institutional and financial details of the Inoculation Department. The chapter is contained within Cunningham and Williams's 1992 collected volume *The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine* (Cambridge University Press), which is the standard historiographic anchor for the analysis of late-19th- and early-20th-century laboratory medicine as a commercial-institutional formation. Page range here is the standard contents-of-volume position; the chapter text has not yet been read by the archive's research team and is flagged for follow-up acquisition before any case bundle citing Chen as a primary independent corroboration is published.
NOTES
Wai Chen completed a doctorate in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge in the 1980s; the 1992 chapter is his most-cited contribution to the historiography of laboratory medicine. The 1992 volume The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine (Cambridge University Press, edited by Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams) is the standard historiographic reference for the institutionalization of the laboratory as the dominant site of medical research and practice in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Chen’s chapter is the volume’s principal case study of laboratory-medicine commercialization. The chapter’s argument and the precision of its corroboration of Wootton’s reading are flagged here as not-yet-independently-verified by the archive; the chapter is on the source-acquisition list and any Almroth Wright Case bundle published by the archive will be gated on the team’s direct reading of the chapter text.