Health and medicine

Abstract

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF MEDICINE The social history of medicine, like most social history, is primarily a development of the last two decades, and arose out of the same congruence of interests which have transformed economic and labour history into social history in that period. The older tradition of the history of medicine, which it has by no means displaced, saw the discipline as essentially inward-looking. This was a doctor-oriented version of medicine, justifying medical history as an illumination of the internal history of the profession or of the discovery or development of technical medical procedures. It assumed a Whig framework of progress towards ever-superior forms of knowledge or organisation, culminating in the state of medical practice at the present day. It therefore had a strongly biographical emphasis; the lives of the ‘great men’ of medicine filled the shelves of the medical history sections. The scientific basis of medical practice was seen as a series of discoveries and of contributions or advances towards present understanding; the analysis of medical institutions was in terms of celebratory histories concentrating on internal milestones of development. ‘The need for a knowledge of the origin and growth of one's profession is surely self-evident’, said Sir Douglas Guthrie in his Presidential address to the History of Medicine section of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1957, ‘it is obvious that history supplies an essential basis for medicine. It gives us ideals to follow, inspirations for our work and hope for the future.’The ‘graph of medical progress’ could, he considered, be depicted as ‘an ever-mounting curve’.