Broadening the Vision of the History of Medicine

Abstract

twentieth century, the history of medicine was a part of medicine itself; it was the business of physicians. But as medicine changed over this long period,1 so too did the role of the history of medicine. For the authors of the Hippocratic texts for Celsus, Galen and other writers of antiquity the history of medicine or, more precisely, the history of medical doctrines, was a matter to be considered and argued by an author as he worked out and justified his own position. This approach was similar to Aristotle's philosophical method of quoting from, criticising and correcting his predecessors. It was, for Aristotle as for the earliest historians of medical doctrine, a way of establishing the truest or most plausible view. The focus that Medieval and Renaissance medical scholars placed on authoritative texts, which now included authoritative texts from Arabic as well as Graeco-Roman sources, perpetuated the ancient role of the history of medicine within medicine itself throughout this period, although in a somewhat different form. In the 250 years between the establishment of modern anatomical studies (most notably by Vesalius in the 1540s)2 and the definitive linkage of clinical observation with pathological anatomy (most notably by French medical reformers of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era),3 the proliferation of new theoretical constructs and experimental techniques eroded the authority that canonical texts had previously enjoyed as models or paradigms of medicine as a system. The first group to lose this status were the Arabic texts, as they were replaced by more extensive and more accurate editions of Galen's works in the later Renaissance.4 We should also not overlook the fact that works by Muslim authors became unfashionable at a time when the Reformation was heightening the Christian sensibilities of both Protestants and Catholics,5 and when the Muslim armies of the Turkish Empire had conquered most of south-eastern Europe and were threatening Vienna.6