Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine by Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein (review)

If we have science, do we really need history? Or perhaps to put the question another way, do historians need to draw on molecular biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics to validate their craft? Steven Pinker certainly seems to think so, arguing that stratigraphy and other scientific borrowings have converted archaeology from “a branch of art history to a high-tech science,” with a concomitant “explanatory depth” (The New Republic, 6 August 2013). Talk to a scientist about collaborations between the humanities and the bench sciences, and any enthusiasm is about the possibility of saving the humanities through science, rather than how the sciences might learn something from the humanities. So the study of the Black Death now involves sequencing microbial DNA extracted from the teeth of its victims to determine whether it really was Yersinia pestis that killed all those people, rather than exploring texts and other evidence about meaning within the past: lots of work here for microbiologists, but none, apparently, for historians, except perhaps as consultants.

The temptation, then, is for historians to adopt such methods in order to remain relevant in the era of big data. Daniel Lord Smail offers one example. Through an analogy to environmental history—which has in some instances drawn on physical geography or atmospheric chemistry to explore the coupling of human and natural systems—Smail argues that the tools of neuroscience offer key insights into what he calls “deep history”: the unbroken continuum of human experience over evolutionary time scales, as opposed to what Smail calls the “shallow history” that characterizes most historians’ approaches to the past (Perspectives on History, December 2012). The biological sciences offer a toolkit for an investigation of human development that situates the brain in an evolutionary context, and which has the capacity to explore the mutual influences of human culture and the body.

Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein are rightly troubled by these notions. This volume of ten essays by Cooter (with Stein a co-author on four)—all but two previously published, and most in the past five years—amounts to a passionate engagement with medical historiography. It is also an indictment of a range of approaches to the medical past. Perhaps their greatest contempt is for a so-called bio-history. For Cooter and Stein, the notion that contemporary science can illuminate the past is epistemologically flawed. Such efforts present an “illusion” of history, “whereas in fact, the present understanding … is being confirmed” (165, emphasis in original). In other words, such approaches tell us more about our present faith in the biomedical sciences than they do about the past: they suggest that “our culturally prized notions of scientific ‘objectivity’ and ‘facticity’ are historically transcendent, not historically fashioned” (ibid.). Cooter and Stein draw on some of Bruno Latour’s incisive critiques of the intersections of science and history in their resistance to the annexation of history by the bench sciences. As Latour famously argued in The Pasteurization of France (1988), there were no microbes before Pasteur: such a notion would be ahistorical. Likewise, Ramses II could not have died of “tuberculosis,” as the disease “was not discovered for a thousand years or more” (167). Where historians would never call a fifteenth-century food riot a Marxist revolution, there is something about biological or physical science that allows such anachronisms.

There is something to this argument, which is perhaps the strongest element of a book that is broad-ranging and densely packed with historiographical critique. Indeed, many would argue that a far more interesting question for historians of medicine than whether Y. pestis “caused” the Black Death might have been what contemporaries imagined afflicted them, or how they felt about and responded to such widespread sickness and death. But there is a critical flaw in Cooter and Stein’s arguments here as well: if neurobiology offers a misguided tool...