Readings in the History of Medicine
Not everyone here is in training to be a historian, yet I am asking you for a while to think and act like one. And 'the history of medicine' is a fraught field, notorious for focusing only on the "discoveries" of white men in white coats. Nurses, women, Black health care providers, seldom appear in this history. We will seek to address some of those gaps in our readings, and we will practice our critical reading skills as we go.
There are two types of things we will read: Primary Sources and Secondary Sources. Primary sources are actual documents from the time period under study. These can be hard to find sometimes but I will make PDFs available or send you to the internet to find copies for yourself. The Medical Heritage Library and Hathi Trust are wonderful repositories, as is JStor and the Emory Library Catalogue. We will cover how to use them all in our first class.
Secondary sources are articles or books written by actual historians based on primary sources and their own analysis. That is what you will be doing this semester, and that means you have to become familiar with what other historians have written about a topic. This body of work is called 'the historiography'.
Some good background sources about how to understand sources and readings in the history of medicine are contained in the book Locating Medical History which the library has as an ebook. Do a catalogue search for it and see what takes your interest.
For our purposes I strongly recommend Ludmilla Jordanova's chapter "The Social Construction of Medical Knowledge". You can download the chapter here
We will also talk a little about historical method, and a good book for that is also by Jordanova, called History in Practice. The library has scanned the Introduction and Chapter One which are on course reserves or here is the PDF. Jordanova History in Practice.pdf Download Jordanova History in Practice.pdf