Related Papers
The History of Medicine
Rochelle Forrester
This paper was written to study the order of medical advances throughout history. It investigates changing human beliefs concerning the causes of diseases, how modern surgery developed and improved methods of diagnosis and the use of medical statistics. Human beliefs about the causes of disease followed a logical progression from supernatural causes, such as the wrath of the Gods, to natural causes, involving imbalances within the human body. The invention of the microscope led to the discovery of microorganisms which were eventually identified as the cause of infectious diseases. Identification of the particular microorganism causing a disease led to immunization against the disease. Modern surgery only developed after the ending of the taboo against human dissection and the discovery of modern anaesthesia and the discovery of the need for anti-septic practices. Modern diagnostic practices began with the discovery of x-rays and the invention of medical scanners. Improved mathematics, especially in probability theory, led to statistical studies which led to a much greater ability, to identify the causes of disease, and to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments. These discoveries all occurred in a necessary and inevitable order with the easiest discoveries being made first and the harder discoveries being made later. The order of discovery determined the course of the history of medicine and is an example of how social and cultural history has to follow a particular course determined by the structure of the world around us.
HISTORY OF MEDICINE (syllabus)
Lucy C Barnhouse
Catalogue Description: Worldwide survey of medicine, disease, and health from prehistoric times to the present. Course Description: The study of medicine is a currently expanding field, but one that took a long time to form. Modern ideas about what medicine is, and about what premodern eras were, have often been at odds. Moreover, particularly in the modern period, class, race, and gender have all affected how medicine is conceptualized and accessed. We will be examining these tensions, and attempting to resolve them in our own work.
Journal of Education in Perioperative Medicine
A Clinician's Rationale for the Study of History of Medicine
2014 •
Sukumar Desai
HISTORY OF WESTERN MEDICINE (syllabus)
2020 •
Lucy C Barnhouse
The study of medical history is a currently expanding field, but one that took a long time to form. Modern ideas about what medicine is, and about what premodern eras were, have often been at odds. Moreover, particularly in the modern period, class, race, and gender have all affected how medicine is conceptualized and accessed. We will be examining these tensions, and attempting to resolve them in our own work. Any historians--including, now, us--looking at medicine are faced with methodological difficulties, as for much of history, medical texts were not grouped or defined as such. In this course, we shall engage with such questions as: How do we define medicine? How do we talk about medicine? How do we decide, as individuals and societies, when to take it and how to give it? We shall also consider how illness and health are defined, and how they define the lives of the sick. We shall examine the ways in which medicine is shaped by social structures, cultural norms, and religious values.
The changing face of medicine throughout the ages
CRAFTING MEDICAL HISTORY: NEW TRENDS AND PRACTITIONERS
2019 •
Guenter B Risse
Like most scholars, historians dealing with the medical past periodically explore and comment on the shifting contours of their distinctive field of studies. 1 While favoring particular theoretical approaches, historiographical reviews also aim at uncovering neglected areas of research and identify new communities of scholarship. 2 Predictably, such explorations are based on individual academic credentials and pedagogical exposures. With the help of specific examples and abundant references, the objective of this essay was to collect and update previous schemes, stressing the fact that the field is currently witnessing a dramatic expansion of subjects, approaches, practitioners, and audiences. From a narrow pursuit of professional roots, a multidisciplinary history of medicine now includes among its subjects the shifting ecology of human health and disease, cultural factors of illness causation and prevention, as well as economic burdens of poverty and pharmacological intervention. 3
Medicine The Definitive Illustrated History
Hilderman Cardona Rodas
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Making Medical History
2006 •
George Weisz
Medical History
Re-Presenting the Future of Medicine’s Past: Towards a Politics of Survival
2011 •
Roger Cooter
The ‘death’ of the social history of medicine was predicated on two insights from postmodern thinking: first, that ‘the social’ was an essentialist category strategically fashioned in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and second, that the disciplines of medicine and history-writing grew up together, the one (medicine) seeking to objectify the body, the other (history-writing) seeking to objectify the past. Not surprisingly, in the face of these revelations, historians of medicine retreated from the critical and ‘big-picture’ perspectives they entertained in the 1970s and 1980s. Their political flame went out, and doing the same old thing increasingly looked more like an apology for, than a critical inquiry into, medicine and its humanist project. Unable to face the present, let alone the future, they retreated from both, suffering the same paralysis of will as other historians stymied by the intellectual movement of postmodernism. Ironically, this occurred (occur...
Historical Archaeology
Introduction: Health and Medicine in Historical Social Contexts
Jennifer Lupu
