The Historiography of Scientific Medicine: An Invitation to the Human Sciences

Abstract

It is clear from the title that this paper has an historiographical emphasis, one which might seem naive to the professional historian, but one which is not at all so naive to the historian of science or medicine. For me, these disciplines should speak to the present; my aim is to direct our attention to the failure of the history of medicine in this respect, and to suggest possible linkages with the human sciences, whose energies are so directed. I do not mean that its subject matter must be drawn from contemporary events—sometimes the very foreignness of the past allows an encapsulation of a situation which gives a clearer view both of the constraints operative within it, and of the unities underlying apparent diversity. This clarity can then encourage a more perceptive reflexion back to the present.