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Reviewed by:
  • What Is Medical History?
  • Jacalyn Duffin and and the 2005 History 482 Seminar
John C. Burnham . What Is Medical History?Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2005. vii + 163 pp. Ill. $19.95 (paperbound, 0-7456-3225-4).

In just over 140 pages of text, John Burnham has given us a useful textbook on the state of the discipline. A distinguished research professor at Ohio State University, the author is well placed to analyze current scholarship. He is a former president of the American Association for the History of Medicine, with a long-standing interest in medical historiography and a quirky sense of humor.

Burnham uses medicalization (and demedicalization) as his main theme. Six chapters—or "dramas"—deal with healers, patients, diseases, knowledge and discoveries, social interactions, and the future. The prose is accessible, and the examples are engaging. Questions challenge readers to contemplate new avenues of inquiry. Completing the work are seven pages of suggested readings and four pages of notes. The intended audience seems to be uninitiated undergraduates, and the overall effect is of an invitation.

It is all too easy to criticize a textbook—but given the usual constraints imposed by publishers, any objections of content lacunae and referencing seem unfair. Sometimes, I wanted to quibble with the organization: why, for example, was humoral theory described in a chapter on patients? Often, I wished that Burnham had emphasized the history of medical history together with the present "state of the art." Occasionally, I wondered why he praised some scholars and overlooked others, more famous, altogether.

But the success of a textbook can be determined only in the classroom. Before being invited to write this review, I had already assigned the book for my historiography of medicine seminar, a one-semester course for graduates and senior undergraduates majoring in history. Until now, no short, accessible, affordable text had been suitable. At a glance, I realized that Burnham had solved that problem—already a strong point in his favor. Students read a chapter or two each week, together with optional selections of my choosing that represented scholarly work around the "drama" (topic) under discussion. The initial response was enthusiastic: Burnham was clear and concise without being condescending, and his joy was infectious. Compared to other works, they found his easy and pleasant. Gradually, the students grew bolder: some were irritated by his clusters of questions, wishing he had provided more answers; a few tired of the simple prose that leapt over vast distances of time and space; others sensed posturing to accommodate politically [End Page 608] correct attitudes; a handful were frustrated by the tendency to jumble accounts of the medical past with accounts of its history—which, I was pleased to discover, they realized were not the same.

A grotesque photograph of a man with half his face eaten away absorbed many minutes of class discussion: why was that distressing image selected to introduce the chapter on disease? And why, if Burnham was committed to multicultural inclusiveness, was an old fashioned doctor's bag used for the cover? Who chose that? What control did he or any author have over length? over subject matter and citations? Good questions, reasonable to ask for any book. The final chapter on future directions struck the students as more sophisticated than what had preceded it, as if Burnham had anticipated their weariness of his catering to the less informed and had "pulled out the stops" to display his expertise.

Granted, the seminar culture fostered criticism; however, by the end, when I asked if What Is Medical History? should be used again next year, the students loudly insisted that it be kept. It had served as a gentle introduction. Everyone claimed to have learned something; most admitted to having learned a lot; and several said that it helped them to imagine how exciting and vast medical history could be. Intriguingly (and ironically), the students' ever sharper criticisms and questions of Burnham were the best product of their having read him at all. We will read him again. You and your students should too.

Jacalyn Duffin and and the 2005 History 482 Seminar
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario

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