Physicians, historians, and the history of medicine

For American medical historiography, to borrow from Dickens, these are the best of times and the worst of times. These are the times when rigorous scholarship has been brought to bear on the field (with great improvement in the quality of research) and when medicine is disappearing from its own history. These are the times when, in general, historians know only their field of specialization and physicians know only how to treat diseases. These are the times of focused competence and general ignorance. The history of medicine has become a field where historians write for other historians who, limited by their ignorance of medicine, cultivate mainly its sociological and political aspects. Physicians, on the other hand, are taught that only what is 'relevant' counts, and practise medicine in ignorance of their past because the history of medicine does not seem to have any immediate utility (1). The few among them who attempt to do something in what is, after all, the history of their profession, are often considered, by historians, naive dabblers who lack knowledge and capacity for the task. This state of affairs came to be fairly recently. It began with a positive development in medical historiography: the realization that the history of medicine was not a discipline that helped to treat diseases but the history of one of man's endeavours, in other words, that it was not a branch of medicine but of history.