Re-Presenting the Future of Medicine’s Past: Towards a Politics of Survival

• Published in: Medical history Vol. 55; no. 3; pp. 289 - 294
• Main Author: Cooter, Roger
• Format: Journal Article Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.07.2011; Medical History
• Subjects: Biology; General points; Historiography; History of Medicine; History of science and technology; History of the history of science and technology; History, 20th Century; Life sciences; Medicine; surgery; pharmacy; Postmodernism; Universities - economics; Universities - history; Universities - organization & administration; Century 20-21; Postmodernism; History of medicine; Neoliberalism; Human Sciences; Multidisciplinarity; Medical Humanities; Epistemic Virtues; Disciplinarity
• ISSN: 0025-7273; 2048-8343; 2048-8343
• DOI: 10.1017/S0025727300005287

The ‘death’ of the social history of medicine was predicated on two insights from postmodern thinking: first, that ‘the social’ was an essentialist category strategically fashioned in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and second, that the disciplines of medicine and history-writing grew up together, the one (medicine) seeking to objectify the body, the other (history-writing) seeking to objectify the past. Not surprisingly, in the face of these revelations, historians of medicine retreated from the critical and ‘big-picture’ perspectives they entertained in the 1970s and 1980s. Their political flame went out, and doing the same old thing increasingly looked more like an apology for, than a critical inquiry into, medicine and its humanist project. Unable to face the present, let alone the future, they retreated from both, suffering the same paralysis of will as other historians stymied by the intellectual movement of postmodernism. Ironically, this occurred (occurs) at a moment when ‘medicine’ – writ large to include the biosciences and biotechnology – could easily be said to be the most relevant and compelling subject for understanding contemporary life and politics (global, local, and individual) and, as such, the place to justify the practice of history-writing as a whole. God knows, legitimacy has never been more urgent. But how can this be effected? Political action seems more likely than prayer. But let us begin by reviewing the nature of the problem that demands this response.