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Medicine Unbound

Review products

GregEghigian, The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in 20th-Century Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015)

StefanosGeroulanos and ToddMeyers, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2019

Corinna Treitel*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Washington University in St Louis
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: ctreitel@wustl.edu

Extract

Why should intellectual historians care about the history of medicine? As someone who admires and draws frequently on intellectual history but is mostly an outsider to the field, I asked myself this question after accepting the invitation to review two books related to medical history for Modern Intellectual History. To make the question manageable, I decided to investigate how much the history of medicine had cropped up in the pages of MIH since it began publishing in 2004. Three terms fundamental to the history of medicine went into the MIH search engine: “medicine,” “physician,” and “disease.” “Medicine” yielded seven hits, “physician” three, and “disease” one. Curious to see in what context “medicine” appeared, I clicked on the seven hits and discovered three book reviews, two articles that made mention of medicine only incidentally, and two articles that connected medicine to the history of subjectivity. Because seven hits seemed low and the subjectivity result intrigued me, I went back to the search engine with a more specific set of terms. “Psychology” yielded sixteen hits, “psychoanalysis” fourteen, and “psychiatry” one. These results, of course, only tell us about the publishing record of MIH and not necessarily about the research interests that intellectual historians might have in the history of medicine. Still, they do suggest that the piece of medical history most useful to intellectual historians concerns the mind/brain sciences—that is, those sciences most likely to engage minds, selves, identities, the individual, and related constructs of interiority. Apparently less interesting is work from other vibrant research areas in medical history: diseases (e.g. cholera, cancer, plague), hospitals, medical education, medical practice, medical technology, medical sciences (e.g. physiology, nutrition, biochemistry), and the body, to name just a few. Intellectual historians, it seems, hold a strong but quite selective interest in medicine right now.

Type
Review Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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