The History of the History of Medicine, 1960-today Dr Claudia Stein

‘Historiography’ means: It can describe the body of work written on a specific topic. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches. I can refer to both the study of the methodology used by historians and the development of history as a discipline.

Theory: A theory is a system of assumptions, principles, and relationships posited to explain a specified set of phenomena.  Methodology: A methodology is often a whole set of methods developed according to a philosophical theory about how best to research and learn about natural or social phenomena. 

Karl Sudhoff, 1853-1938

History of medicine before 1960s: the analysis of text (very much focussed on classical medicine; not material or visual objects) on ‘thinking’ rather then medical ‘practice’ on ‘great men’, great doctors; development of the medical profession a celebratory story of progress and discoveries

Thalidomide Scandal 1960s

Increasing critique of the medical profession: Niklas Jewson, ‘The Disappearance of the Sick Man from Medical Cosmology’, Sociology, 10 (1976), 225-44 Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine (1976); -- Medicial Nemesis: The Expropritation of Health (1974) A powerful new term: Medicalisation: the process by which nonmedical human conditions and problems (being gay, or having a liking for alcohol) come to be treated as a biological condition, and thus turned into subjects of medical study.

Characteristics of medical history in the 1960s: On the political left; Marxist, this has effect on their understanding of how power works (from above, related to the productive forces; alienation from the ‘real’ medicine through professional establishment, patient is silenced) A tendency to use sociology as an inspiration and method for work (quantitative data, sociological models and theories) Rather mechanical language and a distain for narrative; sociological analysis is preferred

Founding members of ‘Our Bodies Ourselves’ of the Boston Women’s Collective

The ‘new’ social history The Making of the English Working Class, 1963 Aimed at discovering the ‘experience’ of the poor and neglected in history Re-discovery of historical narrative and a turn away from sociology Edward Palmer Thompson, 1924-1993

‘Cultural Turn’ from the 1980 Anthropology the study of humans, past and present. It aims to understand the full sweep and complexity of cultures across all of human history and thus draws and builds upon knowledge from the social and biological sciences as well as the humanities and physical sciences. Influential is the work of the anthropologist: Clifford Geertz,’ Thick Description: Towards an Interpretative Theory of Culture’, in ibid, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (1973) In medical history: Arthur Kleinmann, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture (1980s) In wider history, examples of such writing is: Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976); Nathalie Zemon Davies, The Return of Martin Guerre (1983)

The ‘New’ cultural history Of medicine Roy Porter, 1946-2002 ‘The Patient’s View: A History from Below’ – excellent example to see how scholars moved from the social history of medicine to the cultural history of medicine

Lingustic Turn: Analytical turn upon, or problematisation of words/language used in a given field of study. Also used to refer to the ‘turn’ to linguistic philosophy in the late 20th century in the humanities and social sciences.

Cours de linguistique générale (1916) Lingustics: scientific study of language in broadly three aspects: language form, language meaning, and language in context Ferdinand de Saussure, 1857-1913

During the ‘lingustic turn’ Saussure’s ideas were applied to wider human culture; central claims became : Reality is unrepresentable in any form of human culture (whether written, spoken, visual or dramatic) No authoritative account can exists of anything. Nobody can know everything, and there is never one authority on a given subject

Postmodernity Michel Foucault 1926-1984

History writing as a critique of the present

The History of the Body