Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings

16 Making Meaning from the Margins: The New Cultural History of Medicine

C H A P T E R S I X T E E N Making Meaning from the Margins The New Cultural History of Medicine Mary E. Fissell Once I’d hit on the phrase ‘‘making meaning from the margins’’ as a way of encapsulating the project of cultural history, it annoyed me even though it captured my thoughts quite economically. My title irritates me because it points to a tendency in cultural history toward fetishizing the marginal that invites caricature as the history of the weird or bizarre. A friend and I were working in the British Library and met up for tea, and he told me he’d seen a book and immediately thought of me. The book was an early history of embalming. What could I say? Cultural history has attracted a fair amount of hostility, some of which comes from its predilection for the marginal or the transgressive (just as social historians were often attracted to the category of deviance), and I don’t want to provide ammunition for further attack. In this chapter I want to explore how cultural history and the history of medicine have intersected, and I want to proselytize about the possibilities for new work that cultural history affords.1 As will become clear, this is preaching from the converted. I began my historical career as a social historian committed to ‘‘history from below’’ and have, along with many others, become as interested in cultural processes as social ones. In part, this chapter gives me the chance to reflect on how we got here and what we may have lost as well as gained in the process. Making Meaning from the Margins 365 What Is This Thing Called Cultural History? By cultural history, I refer to the boom in historical scholarship influenced variously by anthropology, cultural materialism, the history of mentalités, and so forth that took off in the late 1970s and 1980s. That was the moment when what Donald Kelley has called the ‘‘old cultural history’’—the history of high culture— became ‘‘old.’’2 However, what makes ‘‘old’’ cultural history old is not just its attention to the production of canonical aesthetic or artistic works but also its methods. In what follows, I will highlight some of the methodological characteristics of new work in the cultural history of medicine, emphasizing the shift from social to cultural histories. When I’m in an irreverent mood, I sometimes define cultural history as ‘‘the intellectual history of the semi-literate and their friends.’’ Those who tease me about writing the history of the seventeenth-century equivalent of the sensationalist tabloid Weekly World News endorse this definition. In more serious moments , I argue that the core of cultural history is its attention to the making of meaning—to how people in the past made sense of their lives, of the natural world, of social relations, of their bodies. This definition suggests that meaning is not inherent, that it does not reside within a text or a practice, waiting to be called on. Meaning is not uniform or transhistorical or even apparent. It must be made, and ‘‘making’’ is not an easy or simple process; it admits of struggle, perhaps even of contest. Meanings that are made can be unmade and remade. On another level, ‘‘the making of meaning’’ can, in postmodern fashion, point to our own making of history itself. All of these aspects of ‘‘making meaning’’ imply that we must think about methods as well as topics. My jokey definition about the intellectual history of the unintellectual, however , contains a grain of truth. Cultural history can be understood as an attempt to take some of the methods and questions of intellectual history (Why did he think that? Where did she learn this?) and apply them to members of social groups whose thoughts had not previously been considered of historical interest. Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (first English edition, 1980) is paradigmatic of this attempt, as it is of so much else.3 A heretical miller’s thought is analyzed with great care—What books did he read? How did he frame his cosmology ? With whom did he talk? Why did he think what he did? This intellectual history of developments and prospects in our field is also a more personal story of generational change. I am at a kind of midpoint both in my career as a historian and in understanding where cultural history...