Offline: The moribund body of medical history

Abstract

A former editor of one notable American medical journal once said that an interest in the medical past was a sign that one no longer had anything useful to contribute to medicine's future. This view reflects the way some physicians see historical progress in their chosen specialty—like stamp collecting, accumulating and displaying one discovery after another to illustrate the collective force of past achievement. But the discipline of medical history has more to offer than simply an album of colourful inventions. Owsei Temkin, who directed the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, saw medicine as embedded in the cultural and social life of a particular period. The role of the historian was to interpret, not merely document. If a scientist or physician made a claim, the duty of the historian was not to report that claim, but to ask if the claim was true. Historians should not be concerned only with the technical progress of medicine. They should also be interested in the political and economic conditions that shaped the advances (and setbacks) of a time, as well as the thoughts and feelings of the protagonists themselves—scientists, doctors, nurses, patients. They should ask themselves how an exploration of the past connects with our present. Medical history should provide a “humanistic counterweight to the claims of allegedly irresistible developments”—teasing out aims, attitudes, motives, moral and religious convictions. Temkin argued that historians could never be prophets or preachers. But they should be concerned with human reactions to events and circumstances, from the transformation of medicine into a business to the evolution of medical research to satisfy the concerns of the market (his examples, not mine). The historian's task is to strengthen our ability to resist the adverse trends and demands of our age. And yet, today, the vast majority of medical historians have abandoned any pretence to such ambitions. Most medical historians, it seems, have nothing to say about important issues of the past as they might relate to the present. They are invisible, inaudible, and, as a result, inconsequential.