The historian anatomis'd

Abstract

COME! AND SEE! It is 1990. We are in Cambridge, walking along Free School Lane. Ahead of us stands an imposing stone building which a plaque proclaims to have once been the University Chemical Laboratory. Open the sturdy wooden door and step inside. Turn immediately to the right and open the door in front of you. There is something going on in this room. One man is standing at the front of the room and talking. Sitting at tables arranged in a circle are six or seven young men and women who appear to be listening to the older man's lecture. At the back sits another man, older than the rest of the audience but perhaps younger than the lecturer, taking notes, listening, occasionally commenting. This is the historiography course, and the first rule of the historiography course is that you do not talk about the historiography course. The teachers are Andy Cunningham and Perry Williams, lecturers in the history of medicine at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, embedded within the University's Department of the History and Philosophy of Science. The bright young things at the tables are the Unit's MPhil and PhD students, among whom was a younger incarnation of myself. The purpose of the course was to break down our preconceptions and expose the fallacy of ‘presentism’, also known as Whiggish history; that is, the tendency to reach back into the past looking solely for the direct predecessors of the present day. It is the history of the winners. The course began with classics of Whiggish history of science, such as Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being, with Cunningham and Williams encouraging us to ‘get the game right’: to question, uncover and deconstruct the author's intentions and preconceptions, and to understand why they had written their …