The History of the History of Medicine, 1960-today
Dr Claudia Stein

2 meanings of ‘historiography’:
• It can describe the body of work written on a specific topic. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches. Scholars discuss historiography topically – such as the History of
Pain or the History of Hip surgery, or the History of the
Hospital – as well as different approaches and genres, such as political history or social history.
• refers to both the study of the methodology of historians and development of history as a discipline The research interests of historians change over time, and in recent decades there has been a shift away from traditional diplomatic, economic and political history toward newer approaches, especially social and cultural studies

Methodology: the systematic, theoretical analysis of the methods applied to a field of study. It comprises the theoretical analysis of the body of methods and principles associated with a branch of knowledge. The
methodology is the general research strategy that outlines the way in which research is to be undertaken and, among other things, identifies the methods to be used in it.
Theory is a contemplative and rational type of abstract or generalizing thinking, or the results of such thinking – theory is generally understood as the opposite of practice

Karl Sudhoff, 1853-1938

General characteristics of the writings:
• the analysis of text (not material or visual objects)
• on ‘great men’, great doctors; development of the medical profession
• on ‘thinking’ rather then medical practice
• on a story of medical progress and medical discoveries

Niklas Jewson, ‘The Disappearance of the Sick Man from Medical
Cosmology’, Sociology, 10 (1976), 225-44
Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine (1976);
Medicial Nemesis: The Expropritation of Health (1974) medicalisation: the process by which nonmedical human conditions and problems (being gay, or having a liking for alcohol) come to be treated as a biological condition, and thus turned into subjects of medical study
Characteristics:
• On the political left; Marxist, this has effect on their understanding of how power works (from above, related to the productive forces; alienation from the ‘real’ medicine through evil establishment,
‘revolution’ etc.)
• A tendency to use sociology as an inspiration and method for work
(quantitative data, sociological models and theories)
• Rather mechanical language and a distain for narrative; sociological analysis is preferred

Founding members of ‘Our Bodies Ourselves’ of the Boston Women’s Collective

Edward Palmer Thompson, 1924-1993
The Making of the English Working Class,
1963
Aimed at discovering the ‘experience’ of the poor and neglected in history
Re-discovery of historical narrative

‘Anthropological Turn’ or ‘Cultural Turn’ in the 1980
Anthropology the study of humans, past and present. It aims to understand the full sweep and complexity of cultures across all of human history and thus draws and builds upon knowledge from the social and biological sciences as well as the humanities and physical sciences.
Influential is the work of the anthropologist:
Clifford Geertz,’ Thick Description: Towards an Interpretative Theory of
Culture’, in ibid, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (1973)
In medical history:
Arthur Kleinmann, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture (1980s)
In wider history, examples of such writing is:
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-
Century Miller (1976); Nathalie Zemon Davies, The Return of Martin
Guerre (1983)

The New Cultural History
In Medicine
Roy Porter, 1946-2002
‘The Patient’s View: A History from Below’ – excellent example to see how scholars moved
From the social history of medicine to the cultural history of medicine

Charles Rosenberg, 1936
Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History (1992)

Lingustic Turn:
Analytical turn upon, or problematisation of words/language used in a given field of study. Also used to refer to the ‘turn’ to linguistic philosophy in the late 20 th century in the humanities and social sciences.

Ferdinand de Saussure, 1857-1913
Cours de linguistique générale (1916)
Lingustics: scientific study of language in broadly three aspects: language form, language meaning, and language in context

Sign, signifier, signified : These three come as a trilogy in semiology. The sign is constituted by the relationship of a signifier (a medium, such as a road sign, a word, a gesture) to a signified (also known as the referent, the ‘thing’ being signed.)
The signified is not the thing itself, only a concept of it. Anything is a sign that stands for something other than itself.

Significance of these claims:
 Relationship to knowledge becomes uncertain by undermining the connection between a ‘word’ (signifier) and a ‘thing’ (signified with no relation to the real thing) and making the link conditional and equivocal. ‘Meaning’ and ‘sign’ separated.
 The notion of arbitrariness of the sign deeply challenged the correspondence theory of truth: if words relate only to each other within an own structure, how could language be deemed to refer to the world out there? And how would historians argue that their discourse about the past matched up with ‘what really happened’? How can they claim that they understand the
‘experiences’ of the past?
During the ‘lingustic turn’ Saussure’s ideas were applied to wider human culture; central claims became :
 Reality is unrepresentable in any form of human culture (whether written, spoken, visual or dramatic)
 No authoritative account can exists of anything. Nobody can know everything, and there is never one authority on a given subject

Michel Foucault 1926-1984

History writing as a critique of the present

The History of the Body