History of medicine

Abstract

There are many challenges, developments and successes surrounding the delivery of information to healthcare practitioners and consumers in a fast-changing world. A special issue on medical history may seem incongruous, or even irrelevant, in that context. Why bother about all that old stuff when surely, what we need to know more about is greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness in managing the information of today? Not only is history a hugely popular concern, but most people will readily agree that it matters. In health care, history can teach and inform in many ways. Quite apart from its obvious ability to warn us against repeating the mistakes of the past, history abounds with subtler messages about the dangers of assuming too much by way of scientific knowledge. Treatments are new, illnesses are not, and the ways in which both practitioners and patients of the past have coped with the psychological and physiological traumas of disease can inspire or help us today. A historical perspective is often necessary in order to understand present practices—the recent foot and mouth crisis being a case in point. For all kinds of reasons, people want to know about medical history, whether they are completing a PhD on the development of the NHS, whether they are researching social attitudes to some particular disease or whether their grandfather was a doctor and they wish to know more about him. Medical librarians have a key role to play in preserving the record of today for the historians of tomorrow. The point is succinctly but eloquently made by Roy Porter in his opening piece, and amplified by David Pearson who highlights the difficulties of controlling the ever more diverse contemporary record of medicine, and the need for a collaborative professional approach. Bruce Madge opens up for us the remarkable story of Elizabeth Blackwell—whose Curious Herbal is now automated as one of the British Library’s Turning the Pages projects—and Lucretia McClure teases out the need for ‘experimental doubt’ and the importance of studying the medical past in her paper on ‘Giants’, originally given at last year’s 8ICML Conference in London. The brief communications highlight a range of initiatives and issues that are currently taking place in the medical historical field. A growing interest in the subject, and in the interface between medical training and history, is generating two new CD-ROM products, one sponsored by the Open University and one by The Wellcome Trust. Wellcome are also supplementing their existing support for medical history with an important new funding scheme for libraries and archives. This will be administered in partnership with the British Library and will provide a million pounds during 2001–2 for projects that focus on easing access to, or preservation of documentary collections in medical history. The management and preservation of contemporary medical records also pose many problems; Jo Melling describes his local experiences in the south-west. Many people wish to develop their interest in medical history—Robin Price describes the flourishing diploma course run by The Society of Apothecaries. To quote from Roy Porter, ‘future historians will bless or blame us, depending upon how wisely we act now’. Most medical libraries see their primary responsibility as being towards the present but we have a responsibility to the future too. It is in that spirit that this special number of HILJ is offered, and we hope that readers will be inspired by the challenge.