Cancer in the Twentieth Century

the historyof science, medical historiansmight similarly learn to incorporate biographical and social history approaches to their work. Biography, after all, is just another form of microhistory, versions of which are currently filling the pages of medical history journals. Reiterating Jordanova’s contention, Linker suggests that, by avoiding such areas of major historical debate, social history of medicine will remain in a state of infancy. In the volume’s final chapter, Söderqvist similarly traces attitudes to scientific biography over the last century among historians of science. By the end of the nineteenth century, scientific biography had become a most impressive genre. Although despised and rejected by many working in the field during the decades immediately following the Second World War, the history of science community has gradually begun to regard biography as a useful tool for constructing contexualised histories. No research better upholds this view than Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s study of Boyle’s empiricism, Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985). As a result of this and other expertly contextualised social biographies, ‘no serious historian of science rejected the genre’ (p. 257) by the turn of the last millennium. The contrasts with medical history could not be greater. Soderqvist has collected 15 chapters which reveal the diverse range of biographical writing in the field. Hopefully, this edited collection will inspire medical historians to reconsider this genre further. Rather than lead scholars to shun biographies, it should encourage more of them to publish in journals which support biography and to reexamine the phenomenon of medical biography from a truly historicist point of view. The book will be a great addition to medical history courses, especially those which encourage students to explore the theme of biography. Confronted with just a couple of these excellent essays in a seminar, students, if not their lecturers, might begin to engage critically with some of the thousands of under-used medical biographies that currently sit on book shelves and in university libraries.