Lessons from the History of Medicine

Abstract

What is the point of teaching the history of medicine? Many historians and clinicians find it regrettable that some medical students today will graduate knowing almost nothing of such “greats” of the past as Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Harvey, Lister, and Pasteur. But does this really matter? After all, traditional history of medicine curricula tended to distort medicine's past, omitting the countless errors, wrong turns, fads, blunders, and abuses, in order to tell the sanitized stories of a few scientific superheroes. Modern scholarship has seriously challenged most of these heroic dramas; few of our heroes were as farsighted, noble, or obviously correct as once thought. Joseph Lister, for example, turns out to have had filthy wards, whereas William Harvey was devoted to the Aristotelianism he was long said to have overthrown []. But as the history of medicine has become less romanticized, it has also become much more relevant, for it promises to impart useful lessons in the vital importance of scientific scepticism.