A sociological approach to the history of medicine.

WHAT HISTORY can teach is a much-discussed question and historians themselves are divided about the answer; what medical history can teach is a question which is not often asked and yet there can be little doubt about the answer. The direction of medical effort, both in service and research, is seriously prejudiced because of lack of the perspective which historical investigation could and should provide. The provision of this perspective, I suggest, should be the main aim of the social historian and I have taken my title from Sigerist's essay on 'The Social History of Medicine' written in 1940. He wrote: 'I would like to draw your attention to a field of studies in the history of medicine that has been greatly neglected in the past. If you open a textbook, any textbook of medical history, and try to find what health conditions were in rural France in the eighteenth century, or what disease meant to the family of an artisan at the same period, you will as a rule not find any information. We know much about the great medical discoveries but very little on whether they were applied or to whom they were applied.' Sigerist ended his essay with these words: 'I think that the sociological approach to the history of medicine not only gives us a better understanding of the past but can also help us in planning the future.' On this interpretation, if social history is history with the politics left out, the social history of medicine is medical history with the public interest put in. It is not difficult to suggest why this interest has hitherto been lacking. Those who have taken up the study of medical history have done so mainly for love of history; being fascinated by the lives and work of men such as Hippocrates, Galen and Osler, they seem scarcely to have noticed that these giants were unable to treat anything effectively. In consequence, histories of medicine, like histories of art, have two main themes, the great men and the great movements: Leonardo and the High Renaissance; Pasteur and the rise of bacteriology. A case could be made for the view that the best statistician is the one who dislikes figures and the safest surgeon the one who does not enjoy operating; perhaps the most successful social historian would be one who does not particularly care for history, but turns to …