Problems of Progress: Modernity and Writing the Social History of Medicine

Abstract

Summary Reflecting on the discipline over the last 60 years, this historiographical essay considers how social historians of medicine might deal with the problem that ‘modernity’ and its associated phenomena—progress, tradition and backwardness—have become normalised. It argues that such terms require conscious interrogation and should be situated within a critique of sources, actors’ categories and competing historical interpretations. The essay suggests three routes out of the problem of modernity. First, by shifting the focus to re-interrogate those areas commonly framed as backward; secondly, by using the metaphor of ‘blended modernities’ to examine commonalities across time and space and finally, by employing the everyday as an analytical category to approach those ambiguities and ambivalences that helped structure the nineteenth- and twentieth-century social history of medicine.