This paper attempts to bring new insights to a long-standing historical debate over medical specialization by analyzing the formation of medical mycology, a somewhat marginal biomedical discipline that emerged in the mid-twentieth century around studies of fungal disease in humans. The study of fungi predates that of bacteria and viruses, but from the 1880s it became eclipsed by bacteriology. However, in the postwar period, there were moves to establish medical mycology as an independent speciality. I trace the processes that led (...) to the launch of professional societies in the United States, Britain and Japan, three major players in medical mycology, and more broadly in biomedicine. The analysis of the three different national contexts illustrates how geographical, medico-technological, epidemiological, political and social conditions gave the specialty a distinctive character in each country; this was further complicated by the different and changing medical fields in which fungal diseases were studied and treated. The three case studies show medical specialization as a process that is not simply cumulative but responds to specific historical events and developments. (shrink)

: This article analyzes German debates on the microbiology of infectious diseases from 1865 to 1875 and asks how and when organic pollution in tissues became noteworthy for aetiology and pathogenesis. It was with Ernst Hallier's pleomorphistic microbiology that the organic character of alien material in tissues came to be regarded as important for pathology. The process that followed saw both vigorous biological critique and a number of medical applications of Hallier's work. Around 1874 contemporaries reached the conclusion that pleomorphous (...) vegetation was most likely of little importance if not accidental in relation to the aetiology of infectious diseases whereas the idea of monomorphous micro-organisms facilitated a causal explanation. It was only then that notions such a pure cultures, bacterial specificity, etc. favored by Ferdinand Julius Cohn and his school became popular in medical circles. (shrink)