CRAFTING MEDICAL HISTORY: NEW TRENDS AND PRACTITIONERS

Medicine and Pharmacy Reports, 2017

History of medicine is an extensive and very complex science. In a simple and classical understanding, it has an informative and associative role. Although it is not easy for students to understand the multiple implications of the history of medicine, its importance becomes more evident during their academic formation. The students must be persuaded particularly about the ethical and cultural values that history of medicine has in their training. Furthermore, history of medicine participates in creating the necessary perspective for shaping the future of medicine in the next decades. This is, perhaps, the most interesting role that the history of medicine should play from the modern point of view of students and young physicians. This paper presents different ways of understanding the roles of the history of medicine regarded from the traditional perspective to the contemporary point of view.

2020

The study of medical history is a currently expanding field, but one that took a long time to form. Modern ideas about what medicine is, and about what premodern eras were, have often been at odds. Moreover, particularly in the modern period, class, race, and gender have all affected how medicine is conceptualized and accessed. We will be examining these tensions, and attempting to resolve them in our own work. Any historians--including, now, us--looking at medicine are faced with methodological difficulties, as for much of history, medical texts were not grouped or defined as such. In this course, we shall engage with such questions as: How do we define medicine? How do we talk about medicine? How do we decide, as individuals and societies, when to take it and how to give it? We shall also consider how illness and health are defined, and how they define the lives of the sick. We shall examine the ways in which medicine is shaped by social structures, cultural norms, and religious values.

The story of medicine opens with a struggle -both for survival and for understanding of a world that seemed, to its first human inhabitants, to operate by the whim of powerful forces. So, for millennia, humanity practised primitive preventive medicine - for this was all it could do - by appeasing the gods through ritual and sacrifice.

S&F_scienzaefilosofia.it, 2015

In the late 1960s, social history developed into an imperative approach in general historiography in Germany. Since the mid‐1970s, also social history of medicine has been developed into a comprehensive research approach. But in the 1990s, all of a sudden, social history of medicine vanished. The constructivist history of science, the linguistic‐ constructivist theories in humanities and micro‐historiographical approaches from general history prevailed. After the first decade of the 21st century, the innovative highlights of these developments exceeded. Just at this point, it is appropriate to ask for the genuine and permanent role of a social history of medicine. Seen from the peculiarity of medicine the social history of medicine has a genuine field of topics in the social environment of disease and health. These topics have to be treated with their own approaches and methods, derived from its reference disciplines sociology and economics.

This paper was written to study the order of medical advances throughout history. It investigates changing human beliefs concerning the causes of diseases, how modern surgery developed and improved methods of diagnosis and the use of medical statistics. Human beliefs about the causes of disease followed a logical progression from supernatural causes, such as the wrath of the Gods, to natural causes, involving imbalances within the human body. The invention of the microscope led to the discovery of microorganisms which were eventually identified as the cause of infectious diseases. Identification of the particular microorganism causing a disease led to immunization against the disease. Modern surgery only developed after the ending of the taboo against human dissection and the discovery of modern anaesthesia and the discovery of the need for anti-septic practices. Modern diagnostic practices began with the discovery of x-rays and the invention of medical scanners. Improved mathematics, especially in probability theory, led to statistical studies which led to a much greater ability, to identify the causes of disease, and to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments. These discoveries all occurred in a necessary and inevitable order with the easiest discoveries being made first and the harder discoveries being made later. The order of discovery determined the course of the history of medicine and is an example of how social and cultural history has to follow a particular course determined by the structure of the world around us.

Historical Archaeology

This article surveys anglophone scholarship in the history of medicine over the past decade or so. It selectively identifies and critically evaluates key themes and trends in the field. It discusses the emergence of the discipline from a period of directional crisis to more recent emphasis on a pluralistic and 'bigger-picture' agenda, on comparative, cross-disciplinary and multicultural approaches, and on the reorientation and (putative) broadening out of medical history towards wider public engagement and closer interface with medical humanities.

British Journal for the History of Science, 32/1, , pp. 111-112, 1999

I was sorry to criticize this collection edited by two whose work I respect, but I feel that we should face Stalinism as resolutely as w e face Nazism..

Journal of Education in Perioperative Medicine, 2014

History of medicine does not receive the coverage it deserves in medical school curricula, or during graduate medical training, in part, because of its lack of impact on direct clinical care. This is particularly disturbing for the specialty of anesthesiology not only due to its colorful history, but also because ours is the only major medical discipline to have developed entirely in the United States. We examine four commonly cited reasons for the study of history in general, and comment on whether these lessons are applicable to medicine and anesthesiology. We provide compelling reasons why studying history is important to clinicians. Background: Humans are the only species to be aware of their past. Our future is largely unknown, and the present is fleeting. Thus, almost everything that is known with certainty falls within the realm of history. Thus one would expect society at large, and physicians and anesthesiologists in particular, to be history enthusiasts. As the facts suggest otherwise, one wonders whether history is regarded much like art, music, and fine cuisine-more adornment than an essential and integral part of education in any discipline, especially medicine.

The emergence of global history has been one of the more notable features of academic history over the past three decades. Although historians of disease were among the pioneers of one of its earlier incarnations-world history-the recent "global turn" has made relatively little impact on histories of health, disease, and medicine. Most continue to be framed by familiar entities such as the colony or nation-state or are confined to particular medical "traditions." This article aims to show what can be gained from taking a broader perspective. Its purpose is not to replace other ways of seeing or to write a new "grand narrative" but to show how transnational and transimperial approaches are vital to understanding some of the key issues with which historians of health, disease, and medicine are concerned. Moving on from an analysis of earlier periods of integration, the article offers some reflections on our own era of globalization and on the emerging field of global health.

The Historical Journal, 2023

Histories of medicine and science in the colonies have, conceptually and theoretically, travelled some distance in the last three decades. While public health and epidemics in certain Asian contexts, 1 and mental health and medical stereotypes in the African case, 2 appear to have preoccupied historians

Medical History, 2011

The ‘death’ of the social history of medicine was predicated on two insights from postmodern thinking: first, that ‘the social’ was an essentialist category strategically fashioned in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and second, that the disciplines of medicine and history-writing grew up together, the one (medicine) seeking to objectify the body, the other (history-writing) seeking to objectify the past. Not surprisingly, in the face of these revelations, historians of medicine retreated from the critical and ‘big-picture’ perspectives they entertained in the 1970s and 1980s. Their political flame went out, and doing the same old thing increasingly looked more like an apology for, than a critical inquiry into, medicine and its humanist project. Unable to face the present, let alone the future, they retreated from both, suffering the same paralysis of will as other historians stymied by the intellectual movement of postmodernism. Ironically, this occurred (occur...

The emergence of global history has been one of the more notable features of academic history over the past three decades. Although historians of disease were among the pioneers of one of its earlier incarnations-world history-the recent "global turn" has made relatively little impact on histories of health, disease, and medicine. Most continue to be framed by familiar entities such as the colony or nation-state or are confined to particular medical "traditions." This article aims to show what can be gained from taking a broader perspective. Its purpose is not to replace other ways of seeing or to write a new "grand narrative" but to show how transnational and transimperial approaches are vital to understanding some of the key issues with which historians of health, disease, and medicine are concerned. Moving on from an analysis of earlier periods of integration, the article offers some reflections on our own era of globalization and on the emerging field of global health.

Latin American Research Review, 2019

In 1999 this journal published a book review article suggesting that Latin American scholarship on science and medicine appeared ready to "take off." 1 The prediction was just partially right. Although social studies on science in general have been growing in relevance, almost two decades later they are still in a sort of preliminary stage. However, with studies focused on health, disease, and medicine issues, the balance is significantly different, and there is no doubt about the consolidation of a vibrant subfield of historical inquiry. Only four years after the publication of the LARR article, the first collection of essays in English focused on the history of diseases in modern Latin America was published, anticipating a trend that over time would both gain strength and enhance its agenda. 2 Today monographic works, articles, bibliographies, state-ofthe-art reviews, and edited volumes as well as panels, conferences, and workshops on issues of health and disease in Latin America are recurrent features across the Anglo-American, European, and Latin American academic worlds, frequently in conversation. 3 Recreating, revising, or adjusting questions and problems also discussed in other academic milieus, Latin Americanists from many disciplinary backgrounds-historians, medical anthropologists, public health scholars, sociologists, and cultural critics-have unveiled a domain where health, medicine, healing practices, and disease meanings are contestable, debatable, and subject to controversy. They have increasingly been occupying a terrain previously monopolized by traditional historians of medicine, physicians, and antiquarians. Now, diseases and health issues are time and again discussed as slippery, ambiguous, and