Programs
Graduate Working Groups
History of Medicine Working Group
Coordinators: He Bian and Lisa Haushofer
Faculty Sponsors: David S. Jones
http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/hmwg
The History of Medicine Working Group is an interdisciplinary group that convenes
on a biweekly basis throughout the academic year to discuss emerging scholarship in the history of health and medicine. The
group has three main areas of focus:
- Discussing, debating, and helping to shape participants' work-in-progress.
- Engaging in cross-disciplinary conversations regarding methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of the history of medicine
- Introducing the Harvard History of Medicine community to the work of local and visiting scholars via an intimate seminar setting.
For over fourteen consecutive years, this working group has brought together graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and distinguished
faculty from GSAS, HMS, HSPH, and local universities (including MIT, Wellesley, and Boston University) to discuss emerging themes in the
history of medicine and members' scholarly projects, and to foster the intellectual growth and professional development of our students.
Funding from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has been crucial in enabling the History of Medicine Working Group to develop a
sustained conversation about the relevance, character, and future direction of this particular branch of historical analysis, and to
broaden our interaction with students and scholars from a wide range of departments, disciplines, and schools.
This interaction and critique has only become more important in recent years. At one time, the History of Medicine was merely the
province of physicians-turned-amateur historians, who chronicled the history of their profession more as a hobby than for reasons of
social analysis. In the waning decades of the twentieth century, however, the History of Medicine emerged as a crucial element in the
intellectual arsenal with which pressing contemporary problems in medicine could be understood, made sense of, and ameliorated.
Increasingly over the past decade, historians of medicine have been asked to bring their particular scholarly approach to bear on
health issues of national and international importance - including rising health care costs and various crises in the cost and quality
of medical care, the failure of 'war on' disease campaigns to effect reasonable decreases in mortality or morbidity, the persistence
of inter- and intra-national health disparities, emerging global and local epidemics, medicalization (the redefinition of social and
behavioral characteristics as health problems), ethical issues, medical activism, complementary & alternative medicine, and the balance
between personal and social responsibility for controlling disease. In the thirteen years that the History of Medicine Working Group
has held its seminars, historians of medicine have re-enfranchised and re-constituted many of the historical actors that had been
omitted from the medical histories of the mid-twentieth century - the stories of allied health professionals, suffering patients,
family caregivers, and minority activists have increasingly been integrated with more traditional considerations of the institutional
world intellectual history of medicine. Even the definition of disease itself, once almost entirely the purview of sociological and
anthropological scholarship, has increasingly become the object of nuanced historical analyses that blend intellectual, social,
and cultural history with an acknowledgement of the material, biological reality of both the experiential suffering and the disease
pathology under consideration.
Attendant with these shifts in the purview of the History of Medicine has been the increasing extra-disciplinary relevance of the
field. The tools which Historians of Medicine have at their disposal to trace and interpret changes in medical practice have expanded
to include analytic techniques from anthropology, sociology, epidemiology, literary theory, feminist theory, and cultural studies;
at the same time, historians of medicine increasingly find themselves bringing the tools of history to bear on these other disciplines
and participating in interdisciplinary scholarly conversations such as those on Health Policy or Science & Technology Studies. Our
group interrogates these new developments, educating ourselves and training graduate students academically and professionally in the process.
