Charles E. McClelland - Böcker

Modern learned professions (medicine, law, teaching, engineering, and others) developed in central Europe just as vigorously as in England or America. Yet their close relationship with state power - more typical of the world development of professions than the Anglo-American model - led to a different historical experience of professionalization. This work is the first to explore that experience in a comprehensive way from the time when modern learned professions arose until the eve of World War II. Based on the history and surviving records of German professional organizations, it shows how the learned professions emerged gradually in the nineteenth century from the shadow of strong state regulation to achieve a high degree of autonomy and control over professional standards by the First World War. By studying professional groups collectively, it gives a more contoured picture of their fate under National Socialism than works dedicated primarily to the phenomenon of fascism itself.

Modern learned professions (medicine, law, teaching, engineering, and others) developed in central Europe just as vigorously as in England or America. Yet their close relationship with state power - more typical of the world development of professions than the Anglo-American model - led to a different historical experience of professionalization. This work is the first to explore that experience in a comprehensive way from the time when modern learned professions arose until the eve of World War II. Based on the history and surviving records of German professional organizations, it shows how the learned professions emerged gradually in the nineteenth century from the shadow of strong state regulation to achieve a high degree of autonomy and control over professional standards by the First World War. By studying professional groups collectively, it gives a more contoured picture of their fate under National Socialism than works dedicated primarily to the phenomenon of fascism itself.

American medicine is under serious attack. The health care system is falling short of its major goal, improving the health of the population. The United States ranks only 35th in world life expectancy. But where American medicine arguably remains at a pinnacle in the world – in the status, wealth and power of the profession of medicine -- physicians are in danger of losing first rank. As other professions close the gap, their top economic position is threatened. Slippage may be measured also by other, less quantifiable factors, such as the highest prestige of physicians among all learned occupations.Queen of the Professions: The Rise and Decline of Medical Prestige and Power in America is a colorful yet authoritative work of social history offering readers a sturdy platform from which to confront looming issues about the future of American medical care. Its unique perspective brings crucial context to current debates about modern medicine, exploring in entertaining detail its historical foundations and its present and future challenges.

This work is the first major reexamination in English of the rise of the world’s pioneer modern research university. It presents an authoritative history of science, scholarship, and education, offering readers a background platform from which to confront looming issues about the future of higher education systems everywhere, but especially in the United States. The innovations of the new-model University of Berlin reached their highest point of development and influence on foreign adopters of “technology transfer” under the new German Empire before World War I. These innovations were grafted onto and shaped American higher research, teaching, and professionalization like no other influence in the twentieth century. No previous book in English has described this impressive conscious creation of an institution promoting cutting-edge research—in fields from physics and medicine to law and theology—combined with the highest standards of active, self-involved student learning for the higher professions. Yet even at the moment its astonishing institutional achievements became the inspiration for the brilliant rise of the American research university over the last century, its own contradictions and limitations were already beginning to appear in the 1920s. Indeed, since the University of Berlin was originally little more than a new reformed German university before 1860 and subsequently faced the disadvantages of financial ruin of the 1920s and the imposed wreckage of the Nazi and East German Communist regimes from 1933 to 1990, the period 1860–1918 is the one of greatest interest for the development of what came to be a world-wide “model” for emulation. Today, when the entire concept of the elite “research university” is under attack, revisiting its origins in Germany should provide stimulus to the debates about the future of the university, not only in North America and Europe but in all countries with higher education systems modeled on or influences by the German or American ones (e.g., Australia, India). The question of whether future innovative science and scholarship should remain coupled with teaching institutions as in the “Berlin model” can best be explored against the background of the emergence of that model.