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      Rethinking the History of Peptic Ulcer Disease: from digital textual analysis to declining research programs

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            Abstract

            The history of the research on peptic ulcer disease (PUD) is characterized by a premature abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis, which subsequently had its comeback, leading to the discovery of Helicobacter pylori the major cause of the disease. In this paper we examine the received view on this case, according to which the primary reason for the abandonment of the bacterial hypothesis of PUD in the mid-twentieth century was a large-scale study by a prominent gastroenterologist Palmer, which suggested no bacteria could be found in the human stomach. To this end, we employ the method of digital textual analysis and study the literature on the etiology of PUD published in the decade prior to Palmers article. Our findings suggest that the bacterial hypothesis of PUD had already been abandoned before the publication of Palmers paper, which challenges the widely held view that his study played a crucial role in the development of this episode. The paper makes two main contributions to the literature in integrated history and philosophy of science. First, we suggest that the received narrative on this historical episode, commonly used by philosophers, needs to be revised. Second, we introduce the notion of a declining research program and argue for its importance as a unit of socio-epistemic analysis, especially in combination with normative assessments, such as pursuitworthiness of scientific theories.

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            Author and article information

            Journal
            ScienceOpen Preprints
            ScienceOpen
            3 February 2021
            Affiliations
            [1 ] Ruhr University Bochum
            [2 ] Eindhoven University of Technology
            [3 ] LMU Munich
            Author information
            https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4107-2425
            https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5679-5787
            Article
            10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-.PPAAH0L.v2
            4d72c878-6b9e-43af-bfbe-e060f0a7091f

            This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com .

            History
            : 3 June 2020

            The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
            Philosophy of science
            peptic ulcer disease,digital textual analysis,declining research program,history of medicine,etiology,pursuitworthiness,stress,vagotomy,Helicobacter pylori

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