Medicine and the Goodness of War

Abstract

For reasons that perhaps have much to do with anti-war socialization in the 1960s and 1970s, social historians of medicine have shied away from systematic study of the relations between medicine and war. Where their work has intersected the wars of this century, they have tended to concur with medical writers on the subject, perceiving war simply as good for medicine. This paper challenges that perception by questioning the causal framework in which the relationship between war and medicine has been set—a framework seen to reify both war and medicine. In addition to observing how military medicine existed in peacetime and, secondly, how wartime and peacetime medicine are not so easily demarcated, it argues that the theatres of war and medicine must be studied as part and parcel of the societies and cultures in which they were set, and that they must be seen as economically and ideologically constitutive with those societies. Pursued in this way, the study of war and medicine ceases to be epiphenomenal to the rest of history, and to the rest of the social history of medicine in particular. It becomes, instead, central to it.