Narratives of the History of American Medicine

Abstract

The renaissance and redefinition of American social and cultural history during the past few decades sometimes occasioned concern among medical historians that their field would be resorbed into the larger narratives of American culture and society.' A glance at the field, prompted by the appearance of James Cassedy's accomplished survey, Medicine in America: A Short History, suggests another conclusion: while attracting (and benefiting from) the attention of scholars trained in fields other than medical history, the history of medicine nevertheless remains specialized, thematically distinctive, even somewhat self-contained. Judith Walzer Leavitt's review article in a 1990 American Historical Review, for example, described more than a dozen works in which major themes from cultural and social history, though prominent, mainly served to elucidate issues of longstanding in the history of medicine. The history of the medical profession, alternative practitioners, public health, hospitals, nursing, medical education, biomedical science, and therapeutics, always the core of medical history's central narratives, remain at the center of most recent work in the field. These studies, nevertheless, incorporate many newer approaches to questions of social context and discursive boundaries: the social construction or framing of notions of health, illness, and disease; the significance of race and gender in the formation of professional practices and communities of knowledge; the interpenetration of politics and policy in public health. They describe what Charles Rosenberg has called an ecology of medical knowledge and practice, a culture of medicine formed through the interaction of ideas, values,