Explaining epidemics and other studies in the history of medicine

In 1990 I had the privilege of hearing Owsei Temkin lecture to the American Association of the History of Medicine. When I expressed my admiration to Charles Rosenberg, he replied that, "yes, Temkin made him feel inadequate". Most historians of medicine should respond similarly to Rosenberg's own collected essays, and many of them will. Such an introduction is not arbitrary, for Rosenberg presents himself as a bridge between recent social historiography of medicine and the inter-war generation of Henry Sigerist, Temkin, Ludwig Edelstein, Erwin Ackerknecht, and (from a different background) Richard Shryock. Rosenberg's indebtedness to his teachers undermines many of the sillier claims for novelty in recent historiography; instead it reveals a developing tradition, in whose richness and variety we can take a deeper pride. Here is the root of Rosenberg's own versatility, and of his considerable influence as a teacher. The three sections of the book demonstrate that range. The first, 'Ideas as actors', centres on the conceptual structure of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century medicine. The second group of essays explores 'Institutions and medical care'. The final group uses history to reflect on present medical dilemmas, especially AIDS, the role of psychiatry, and the crisis of hospital medicine. Almost all of the essays have been published before, and sometimes they overlap, but Rosenberg has provided introductory notes explaining why the essays were written, or how they fit together. These give a nice sense of development and of a historian responding to contextual demands. Many of these essays are already classics. Is there any better depiction of the Western medical cosmologies c. 1700-1870 than Rosenberg's 'The therapeutic revolution'? What other analysis would one give to an anthropologist who wanted to understand the Western tradition "before germs"? What recent account of a medical text is more subtle or better contextualized than Rosenberg's essay on William Buchan's Domestic medicine, here seen as weaving together physicians' books on regimen and more traditional popular forms, such as recipe books? Here was a hybrid genre, encouraging the independent bourgeoisie to make judicious use of physicians. American historiography of medicine has long been bound into the urban and social history of nineteenth-century America, but where is there a better short cross-section of urban medicine than in Rosenberg's chapter on New York? Or a better account of what in Britain would be called a workhouse hospital? Where else would you get a better sense of a hospital as intersecting …