The History of Medicine in the Digital Age

Digital forms of communication are rapidly changing the landscape of humanities research in the United States. As little as five years ago, that research circulated primarily as static print texts—chiefly journals, articles, and books—access to which required the privileges of a university library. While this traditional print scholarship continues to be extremely important, what counts as a knowledge product is coming to include a wide range of digital forms such as blog posts, podcasts, websites, and Twitter feeds that their makers can share with anyone who has access to the Internet, usually at little to no cost. Many historians, including historians of medicine, have begun to embrace these new media forms and the opportunities they offer to reach a broader audience. At the same time, these trends are also anxiety-producing, a response apparent at the luncheon workshop on “The AAHM in the Digital Age” held at the 2013 annual meeting in Atlanta.

Much of that anxiety stems from a concern that the new digital forms of scholarship will undercut the quality and legitimacy of the older print forms. In the context of dwindling library budgets and institutional support for humanities scholarship, the idea of promoting new digital forms of knowledge production may seem risky. Precisely because the use of digital media has come to be seen as trendy, yet another academic buzzword thrown around to curry administrative favor or build an academic reputation, many academics see reason to beware their spread. For historians of medicine, this kind of caution comes easily, in that our own research affirms the perils of an uncritical hankering to align with the latest trends in science and technology. We instinctively distrust any sort of triumphalist narrative that promotes digital technologies as the answer to the latest declaration of a humanities “crisis.”¹

But as the history of medicine also teaches us, technologies in and of themselves do not “cause” anything; it is how they are used that makes for different outcomes. In that spirit, we propose in this article to take a closer look at how our fellow historians of medicine are using new forms of digital media. As their work shows, using digital tools to create different forms of knowledge does not mean demeaning or diluting traditional academic scholarship. In fact, the combination of new and old forms of knowledge production and dissemination can help both to prosper.

The work historians of medicine are undertaking under the umbrella of “digital humanities” aims to create both different kinds of knowledge and new pathways for circulating that very knowledge.² The scholarly products being created with digital tools vary enormously: some represent additions or enrichments to traditional scholarly work, while others represent a more radical departure from accepted models for how research should be conducted and shared.³ While the use of digitization as enrichment has been relatively easy to assimilate, the more dynamic, interactive forms of digital scholarship have represented more of a challenge to existing academic standards.

Many digital humanities projects originated not as Internet collaborations but as digital components of existing library and archival initiatives. These include digital components of museum exhibitions as well as electronic replication and re-creation of primary sources, including those too fragile or damaged for use.⁴ For example, the Wellcome released a hundred thousand historical images under an open license in the beginning of this year. The Wellcome’s website embraces open access and offers “images ranging from ancient medical manuscripts to etchings by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Francisco Goya . . . for free download as hires images on [its] website.” All the digitized images have been released under the Creative Commons-Attribution only (CC-BY) license, and readers are encouraged to use them.⁵ Another example is Duke University’s Digital Scriptorium, which early on began to make historical images in its collections accessible, including the Medicine and Madison Avenue website created in 2000, which “explores the complex relationships between modern medicine and modern advertising.”⁶ The site makes six hundred health-related advertisements printed in newspapers and magazines freely available to online users for research...