Remapping the History of Medicine: Fifteen Years of Health and History

Abstract

Health & History, 2013. 15/2 5 Remapping the History of Medicine: Fifteen Years of Health and History Naomi Rogers and John Harley Warner Commemorating the 10th anniversary of Health and History, Warwick Anderson, the journal’s first editor, traced its origins back to the summer of 1995, when the Australasian Society of the History of Medicine held its biennial conference on Norfolk Island. ‘After the Norfolk Island conference’, he recalled, ‘there was a general feeling of confidence and heft in the society, a sense of maturity that seemed to demand some flagship publication’ (vol. 10, 2008, p. 1). For our part, we recall arriving on the island after a long series of flights from North America as new parents with our five-week-old son Nathaniel, spitting out his pacifier on the airport floor, screaming in full voice as one of us gave the keynote lecture, and spitting up on the governorgeneral ’s carpet at what we like to think of as his first state reception. The journal, Anderson remarked, ‘soon became a robust toddler’, and so too our son. As much as we resist lifecycle metaphors, for us they are unavoidable as we reflect on the healthy growth of both, watching them develop their own mature voices, navigate challenges, chart a confident course, and—by intellectual, cultural, and political engagement—make a difference in the world. Two choices made in the journal’s formative years have continued to inform its distinctive historical character and sustain its inclusive scope. Forged as it was through the collaboration of practicing physicians and professional historians, the journal made a deliberate commitment to provide a forum for both constituencies, as authors and as readers. Maintaining a productive balance between the historical interests and professional concerns of these two groups has often not been easy for medical history journals, societies, or conference organisers, and all too many gave up trying. Health and History, however, remained committed to inclusivity and breadth, reaffirmed in a 2008 special issue that explored the special role of the physician-historian. Not only have its pages benefited from the vitality of interdisciplinary exchange, but also, at a time when many other medical history institutions are struggling to win doctors back to the fold, Health and History finds itself admirably poised on the forefront. 6 NAOMI ROGERS & JOHN HARLEY WARNER The second foundational choice could be seen—wrongly, we believe—to pull in the opposite direction from the first, namely, the decision to eschew ‘medicine’ in favor of ‘health’ in the journal’s name. All but one of the major Anglophone journals in the field—the exception being Nursing History Review—has inherited the narrow and now somewhat anachronistic ‘medical’ moniker—the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Journal of the History of Medicine, Medical History, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, and even Social History of Medicine, doubly dated by the modifier ‘social’ that celebrates a transformative but now dated historiographic moment. From the outset, Health and History claimed the more expansive territory of the history of health cultures that captures the preoccupations and purview of our shared field. The journal has been remarkably successful in recruiting contributions that explore the widest compass of medical knowledge and institutions, the experience of illness, the interactions of healers and sufferers, and the multiple meanings of disease and disability. But what strikes us most in looking through volumes from the past fifteen years is the journal’s outward vision—a connectedness that extends beyond the historiographic engagement of individual articles to a dialog with archivists, non-medical historians, museum curators, and the wider public. The special issues that have been a signal feature of the journal have provided a platform for this broader engagement. The 1999 special issue on the preservation and scholarly use of medical records, for example, grew from a 1997 University of Melbourne symposium in which one of us participated that brought together researchers in history and epidemiology with archivists and record managers, and set the template for subsequent special issues. The vitality of these collections on themes such as Maori health, deinstitutionalisation in Australia and New Zealand, health and hybridity in the Pacific region, and military medicine have derived much of their...