Making Medical History

Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner, eds. Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. x + 507 pp. Ill. $45.00 (0-8018-7861-6). Reviewing volumes of collected essays is notoriously difficult, and this book is no exception: its twenty-one essays are uneven in quality and represent a considerable diversity of topics and approaches. The editors emphasize that one of the unifying threads of the volume is that medical history has never been a real discipline—it was and continues to be a pluralistic field made up of "widely disparate historical endeavors" (p. 4). Adding to the difficulty of writing about essays reflecting "widely disparate historical endeavors," presented moreover in "widely disparate" ways, is the fact that these touch on my own career choices and those of close friends and colleagues. So in addition to "wide disparity," there is emotional baggage with which to contend. Nonetheless, I am delighted to have been given the opportunity to comment on this badly needed book. All academic fields require periodic self-reflection, and we medical historians have not done much of it in recent years. Furthermore, the position that it takes with respect to older work in the history of medicine is one that I share. For many years now, we have caricatured older work in the field (that of Henry Sigerist excepted)1 in order to promote one or another agenda of social and/or cultural history of medicine; it is time to get past such intellectual simple-mindedness and develop a more subtle and interesting approach to our [End Page 153] own history and practices. A further virtue of this book, and the reason everyone should buy it, is that it attempts to be international and makes visible the work of several scholars who are not known or read by many English-speaking historians. Let me begin by giving a brief account of the book. It is divided into three parts, of which the first deals with early histories and historians of medicine. This section holds together quite well. International in scope, it presents material with which most readers will be unfamiliar. Essays in this section are written by scholars in Germany (Hans-Uwe Lammel, Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach, and Thomas Rütten), France (Danielle Gourevitch), the United Kingdom (Vivian Nutton), and the United States (Elizabeth Fee and Theodore Brown). The orientation of these illuminating papers is overwhelming biographical; except for Vivian Nutton's contribution, which masterfully deals with the historiography of the entire domain (small to be sure) of ancient medicine, most authors center their accounts on individual figures, or on two contrasting figures. So much for the much-touted disappearance of biography and "great doctors" from medical history. The second section is harder to characterize. Titled "A Generation Revisited," it contains essays that examine developments during the past few decades. Some are highly idiosyncratic. The one by the late Roy Porter assumes the charming tones of an after-dinner speech in discussing some British work (chiefly demographic) that Porter found interesting. Susan Reverby and David Rosner offer a personal account of the emergence of the "New" social history in the United States circa 1980, and then present a very brief evaluation of how it has fared. The social history that they are tracking is a very specific current within the larger social history of medicine: it is American, highly politicized, and can be summarized by the trinity "gender, class, race" (sometimes with the addition of "sexuality")—a phrase that is repeated like a mantra throughout the essay. Three papers provide more-conventional accounts of specific historical domains: German and, to a lesser extent, French work in the social history of medicine (Martin Dinges); colonial and post-colonial medical history (Warwick Anderson); and the intellectual tradition of Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault (Christiane Sinding). Finally, there is a wonderful, albeit flawed, "scientometric" account of the field by two Dutch scholars writing out of the Science Studies tradition (Olga Amsterdamska

Diversity (politics) · Field (mathematics) · Media studies · Order (exchange) · Sociology · Anthropology · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History · Medical History and Innovations · Medical History and Research

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