Comment: What Historians of Medicine Can Learn from Historians of Capitalism

Christy Ford Chapin's position paper gave me a great deal to think about regarding both my own scholarship and my personal experience as a historian. I agree wholeheartedly with her call for more crosstalk between the New History of Capitalism (NHC) and the history of health and health care. Not only have scholars under that umbrella explored topics with obvious relevance to BHM readers—I think here of Michael Zakim's work on "desk diseases" and Edward Baptist's reinterpretation of the physical brutality of American slavery—but also their interest in processes such as "commodification," and "financialization" overlaps with our field.¹ While seconding Chapin's call for engagement with the NHC, I want to raise some questions about how we frame that encounter that I hope will be useful to the BHM readership.

As Chapin notes, the origins of the NHC are usually linked to recessions, first the Silicon Valley bust of 2002–3 and then the Great Recession of 2008.² Complicated phenomena such as mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps inspired historians to "pop the hood and look inside" the inner workings of modern capitalism, as Steven Mihm put it in 2014.³ The result has been a diverse array of works now loosely associated with the NHC. As reviews of the field observe, it has yet to crystallize around a single methodology or set of arguments and likely never will. In part, that reflects a deliberate move on its practitioners' part to resist defining what capitalism is or clearly demarcating its stages of development. As Louis Hyman wrote in 2013, "The essential problem is not to primly define capitalism like a schoolmarm, but to think about why capitalism, which appears to be so simple, evades easy definitions."⁴

At the same time, practitioners of the NHC do share common assumptions. They vehemently reject the idea that capitalism is a natural phenomenon and work to show how it is embedded in the politics and culture of the time. In place of the more "bottom-up" focus on workers or consumers characteristic of labor history or social history, they look up the social hierarchy to the makers and maintainers of capitalism's economic infrastructure: its accounting systems, credit instruments, tax structures, and insurance policies, as well as the legal and governmental measures that support them. Tying all that together, Seth Rockman observes, are two key concepts: commodification, "the process by which things are made into commodities," and financialization, the complex processes by which markets come into being and facilitate third-party investment in a widening range of human activities.⁵

In advancing this agenda, proponents of the NHC see themselves as reversing a divergence between history and economic history that began in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapin presents a short version of this common origin story. "Unaccustomed to econometric methods," she writes, "historians largely ceded economic history to economics departments, where quantitative data were more eagerly sought and statistical techniques more comfortably rendered" (p. 322). As a result, she argues, history's public standing was diminished and its policy voice muted, for example, in the 2010 debates over Obamacare. "The New History of Capitalism is, in part, an answer to this disciplinary shortcoming," she suggests (p. 322).

Having lived through the events she describes, I want to offer a different perspective, one that underlines disciplinary continuities rather than shortcomings. As a graduate student in the University of Pennsylvania's History Department from 1974 to 1978, I was shaped by a new social history that sought to combine qualitative and quantitative methods.⁶ Historians of my generation, I would suggest, did not lose interest in the economic dimensions of the past because we were scared of statistics. Rather we felt alienated by an economics discipline dominated, at least in the United States, by Milton Friedman's theories, and by a particular kind of economic history that seemed determined to ignore the aspects of the past that we found most interesting. Louis Galambos's 2014 retrospective on his career offers a perceptive account of the dilemmas that...