Communicating the History of Medicine

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has thrust many historians of medicine, myself included, into popular conversations about public health, the cultural framing of disease, and the social determinants of health. At no other time in recent memory, save perhaps for the response historians mounted to contextualize the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the work of historians as expert witnesses for tobacco companies in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively, have medical historians been called upon to unpack a disaster in real-time; to humanise, to guide public policy and to push back on xenophobia, racial injustice and class warfare. We are penning op-eds, speaking to journalists, giving public talks, spearheading new forms of digital content and leading innovative oral history projects. We have long been doing these public-facing engagement activities, but the current pandemic has brought our field into public purview in new, but unsurprising ways. It is an interesting time

Framing (construction · Media studies · Political science · Public health · Public relations · Sociology · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine · History