Comments on the Diversity of Medical Histories

2019

Like most scholars, historians dealing with the medical past periodically explore and comment on the shifting contours of their distinctive field of studies. 1 While favoring particular theoretical approaches, historiographical reviews also aim at uncovering neglected areas of research and identify new communities of scholarship. 2 Predictably, such explorations are based on individual academic credentials and pedagogical exposures. With the help of specific examples and abundant references, the objective of this essay was to collect and update previous schemes, stressing the fact that the field is currently witnessing a dramatic expansion of subjects, approaches, practitioners, and audiences. From a narrow pursuit of professional roots, a multidisciplinary history of medicine now includes among its subjects the shifting ecology of human health and disease, cultural factors of illness causation and prevention, as well as economic burdens of poverty and pharmacological intervention. 3

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2006

European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.

2004

teaches science studies and history of medicine at the University of Amsterdam. She has published articles o n the history of the biomedical sciences, especially o n the relations between the laboratory and the clinic in microbiology and biochemistry. Her current research centers o n the history of British and American epidemiology and the changing notions of what makes epidemiology a science. '.varwick Anderson is the Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Population Health and chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of iVisconsln, Madison. When he wrote this essay he was director of the history of the health sciences program at the University of California at San Francisco. In 2003, Basic Books published his study of race science in Australia, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, arid Racial Destiny. He is currently worhng o n what he hopes is a postcolonial study of kuru investigations In the highlands of New Guinea and in Bethesda, Maryland. Allan hi. Brandt is the Kass Professor of the History of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he directs the Program in the History of Medicine. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of the History of Science, where he is currently chair. His work focuses o n the social history of medicine, disease, and p u b l~c health policy in the twentieth-century United States. He is the author of No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Diseate in the Unitedstates since 1880 (1987) and editor of MoralifyandHealth (1997).

BMJ, 2006

Values are important parts of our lives. But values and conscience have different roles in public and private life. They should influence discussion on what kind of health system to deliver. But they should not influence the care an individual doctor offers to his or her patient. The door to "value-driven medicine" is a door to a Pandora's box of idiosyncratic, bigoted, discriminatory medicine. Public servants must act in the public interest, not their own. Contributors and sources: JS is a professional medical ethicist with experience in practising general and emergency medicine. This article arose from reflections on the literature and his experience Competing interests: None declared.

Hisham Mohammad, 2023

how to appruach and present medical history

Lancet (London, England), 2018

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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..