Culture, Literature, and the History of Medicine

Raymond Williams famously wrote that ‘culture’ was one of the two or three hardest words to define in the English language. That being true, it should come as little surprise to academics that defining ‘cultural history’, or the history of culture, isn’t much easier. Like ‘culture’, ‘cultural history’ can apply to many different kinds of things – the history of cultural production, the history of cultural representations, the history of cultural belief, the history of cultural processes – and the aims and methods for each of these potential areas of study are by no means clear. How, for instance, do you chart the progress of a cultural representation such as ‘The Leper’, attending to the social, moral, and political connotations that shape it, while avoiding the suggestion that such a representation was uniformly accepted across an entire group of people living in a particular time and place (an entity sometimes referred to as a ‘culture’)? Likewise, how might an historian investigate the history of a cultural process such as the rituals surrounding death and dying; what kinds of sources should be used, what kinds of assumptions avoided, what kinds of questions asked? If we think about the kinds of books that have been written on leprosy or death, we realise very quickly that there is no single set of solutions to the problems raised here; compare, for instance, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization [1961] (repr. London: Routledge, 2006), which begins with the leper before moving onto the madman in its analysis of social exclusion and political control in Western history, with Bernard