The Seat at the Table Problem: Broadening Reception for Historians of Medicine and Public Health.

In “Making the Case for History in Medical Education,” David Jones et al. identify a promising inroad for the history of medicine into the medical curriculum: the ability to satisfy multiple curricular competencies. Alongside the field’s virtues, however, they discuss persistent difficulties with inconsistent funding, curricular time, and qualified instructors that reflect a lower priority for history in medical education. Their essay addresses one dimension of what I call the Seat at the Table Problem: the frustration historians face in proving their importance and weaving their way into nonhistory circles, both inside and outside the academy. Here, I explore the problem further by moving the discussion beyond medical schools and into health policy and public health. But I examine the history discipline itself as well and ask whether it is doing everything it can when it comes to training students who can widen the discipline’s reception and appeal, especially at a time when history and the humanities’ relevance are being called into question. I base these remarks on my own recent experience as a graduate student, and some are more impressionistic, meant as fodder for further debate. The more critical observations, in fact, arise from a longstanding sense of what I wish I could do better as a scholar but cannot. In , I received a degree from a traditional history department but did so in a less orthodox way, earning a Masters in Public Health (M.P.H.) simultaneously. During my last two years of graduate school, the United States Department of Education funded my studies, and afterwards, I left for a two-year postdoctoral fellow in a school of medicine and public health. The program requirements of all three meant that I took courses and interacted with as many nonhistorians as historians. In these orbits, I soon noticed—whether attending seminars on changing Medicare reimbursement or reading Institute of Medicine (IOM) reports for class—that historians were not nearly as Commentaries 