Blurring Boundaries: Towards a Medical History of the Twentieth Century (original) (raw)
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Social History of Medicine Today – a Classic Approach Beyond the Turns of the Turns
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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.
CRAFTING MEDICAL HISTORY: NEW TRENDS AND PRACTITIONERS
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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
Re-Presenting the Future of Medicine’s Past: Towards a Politics of Survival
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...
Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science,, 2017
This article reflects on the history of medicine as an academic discipline. It analyzes in particular the debates that took place in France between the second half of the 20 th and the beginning of the 21 st century. The first part recalls the main features of the discussions about the history of medicine since it was identified as an autonomous discipline up to the epistemological turn that, in the middle of the 19 th century, opposed partisans of a " philological and scientific " to partisans of a " heroic " history of medicine. The second part deals with the debates that began in France in the 1960s-1970s over the legitimacy of a history of medicine written by physicians, and the foundation of a history of medicine written by professional historians. The third part proposes a reflection on the future of research and teaching in this field in France, and highlights the need for cooperation between physicians and specialists in the human and social sciences.
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