Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings (review)

Huisman and Warner assembled this collection hoping to provide common ground for current debates within medical historiography. Unfortunately their volume does not achieve this end. Its contents simply do not hold together. The essays presented here are of different genres and their themes are too scattered to create a comprehensive whole.

Based on the introduction and titles of the chapters, this reviewer expected Part I ("Traditions") to present a clear discussion of the evolution of medical history writing on the European continent. Instead, most of the essays in this section are directed at initiates already familiar with the conversation between medical historians and the medical and intellectual communities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany and France. And, while the New World (and perhaps the entire Anglophone) background is admittedly less stimulating, a chapter on the early collective biographies and national histories produced by North American (and perhaps British) doctors would have been useful, especially if followed by a review of efforts to teach medical history, organize medical history societies, and publish medical history journals. These topics are only partially covered, in Fee and Brown's essay contrasting Osler and Sigerist.

Part II of this book ("A Generation Reviewed") is sorely in need of a chapter or two on the Europeans who professionalized American medical history. As an example, references to Erwin Ackerknecht are sprinkled throughout the volume, but nowhere is there serious mention of the content of his works, several of which should remain required reading. Ackerknecht was a Trotskyist political activist while a student in Leipzig (he later blamed himself for Sigerist's interest in communism), a political refugee who immersed himself in structuralism while studying anthropology in popular-front France, and a key contributor to the development of the social history of medicine in the United States. How can we "locate" medical history without locating Ackerknecht in relationship to Henry Sigerist, Owsei Temkin, and their contemporaries? And how can we understand the American-born participants and antagonists in this professionalization process—starting with Fielding Garrison or Edward Krumbhaar or John Fulton—when they are barely (if at all) mentioned? How did American historians who were not medically trained (Richard Shryock or Genevieve Miller, for example) learn from, teach, and otherwise interact with the Europeans? Understanding the histories written by George Rosen, Thomas Bonner, and the generation of Gerald Grob and Charles Rosenberg requires an understanding of how American academic traditions in sociology, the history of science, and social history intersected with what Ackerknecht and Temkin brought to America and what Rosen brought back with him from his Berlin days.

As could be expected, the essays are uneven in quality. I generally agree with Alfons Labisch's uneasiness about the autobiographical approach that the editors proposed to some of the authors; it is too easy under these circumstances to be self-indulgent and, relying on memory rather than sources, less than rigorous. Among those that skirt autobiography, Ludmilla Jordanova's essay from the mid-1990s (reprinted here with a postscript) stands out for its clear statement of how social construction arguments are most appropriately used in discussions of medical knowledge.

I took particular note of three of the autobiographical essays, but for different reasons. As a group, the chapters by Alice Dreger, Allan Brandt, and Sherwin Nuland all seemed very much out of place in Part III, a section called "After the Cultural Turn." (Dreger's interest in intersexuality may seem "cultural," but her approach is social and is grounded in biology.) The chapters by Dreger and Brandt are well reasoned, impassioned, and based on a clear analysis of empirical evidence—and will inform even those who disagree that medical history can be of use to the activist (Dreger) or the policymaker (as described by Brandt). These two essays tell good stories and are of interest, at the least as primary sources. Nuland's chapter, on the other hand, is a disappointment. Setting itself up against...