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Re-Presenting the Future of Medicine’s Past: Towards a Politics of Survival1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Roger Cooter
Roger Cooter
Affiliation:
Roger Cooter, Professor, The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, UK. Email: r.cooter@ucl.ac.uk
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The ‘death’ of the social history of medicine was predicated on two insights from postmodern thinking: first, that ‘the social’ was an essentialist category strategically fashioned in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and second, that the disciplines of medicine and history-writing grew up together, the one (medicine) seeking to objectify the body, the other (history-writing) seeking to objectify the past. Not surprisingly, in the face of these revelations, historians of medicine retreated from the critical and ‘big-picture’ perspectives they entertained in the 1970s and 1980s. Their political flame went out, and doing the same old thing increasingly looked more like an apology for, than a critical inquiry into, medicine and its humanist project. Unable to face the present, let alone the future, they retreated from both, suffering the same paralysis of will as other historians stymied by the intellectual movement of postmodernism. Ironically, this occurred (occurs) at a moment when ‘medicine’ – writ large to include the biosciences and biotechnology – could easily be said to be the most relevant and compelling subject for understanding contemporary life and politics (global, local, and individual) and, as such, the place to justify the practice of history-writing as a whole. God knows, legitimacy has never been more urgent. But how can this be effected? Political action seems more likely than prayer. But let us begin by reviewing the nature of the problem that demands this response.

Keywords

Epistemic VirtuesPostmodernismNeoliberalismDisciplinarityMultidisciplinarityMedical Humanities
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 289 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

2 Roger Cooter, ‘After Death/After-“life”: The Social History of Medicine in Post-Postmodernity’ Social History of Medicine, 20 (2007), 441–64.

3 See James Vernon, ‘The End of the Public University in England’, online: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/the_end_of_the_public_university_in_england, accessed 25 January 2011.

4 Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). The audit culture bears as much on the sciences as on the humanities; as the historian of science, Paul Forman, has noted, today ‘the beau ideal is no longer the “disinterested” scientist of modernity, but the entrepreneur for whom success is the only criteria of merit’: ‘(Re)cognizing Postmodernity: Helps for Historians – of Science Especially’, Bericht zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 33 (2010), 7. See also, Karin Knorr Cetina, ‘The Rise of a Culture of Life’, EMBO Reports, 6 (2005), 76–80.

5 Richard Overy, ‘The Historical Present’, Times Higher Education, 29 April 2010, 34. Or, as Jeffrey Sammons puts it, what is in need of protection today is ‘learning that disturbs and disrupts… that cannot be relied on for ulterior purposes and yet is wholly necessary for keeping open the options of being human, that cannot be defended on the grounds of what is it good for because no one can know what it is good for until it has been explored, examined, and weighed in each generation’: ‘Squaring the Circle’ (1986), quoted in Robert Post, ‘Debating Disciplinarity’, Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009), 760.

6 Anthony T. Grafton, ‘Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities’, New York Review of Books, 8 April 2010, 32; Simon Head, ‘The Grim Threat to British Universities’, New York Review of Books, 13 January 2011. See also, Martha Nussbaum, ‘Skills for Life: Why Cuts in the Humanities pose a Threat to Democracy Itself,’ Times Literary Supplement, 30 April 2010, 13. For the American situation, see ‘Campus Cuts’, and ‘How the University Works’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 June 2010, at http://chronicle.com/blog/campuscuts/21.

7 As Robert Rosenstone remarks, most scholarly works of history ‘are written as if to cater only to those who already want to know about a particular subject and they write off the rest of the public. In the way they hang on to outmoded kinds of narrative and analysis, they seem to assume that you should care about what they have to say, but they don’t justify that assumption. History is good for you, they imply – but they never say why. And if they don’t answer that question, why would anyone else?’: ‘Space for the bird to fly’, in Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow (eds), Manifestos for History (London: Routledge, 2007), 17. Conventional historians just dig bigger and bigger holes for themselves in condemning postmodern trends without admitting to the subjectivity of their own practices and to their blind faith in ‘objectivity’. Anthony Beevor, for example, the author of Stalingrad, rails at Hilary Mantel’s phenomenally successful fictionalisation of the life of Thomas Cromwell – Wolf Hall (London: Fourth Estate, 2009) – on the grounds that this ‘histotainment’ and ‘faction-creep’ dangerously ‘corrupts’ the boundaries between fact and fiction, objectivist Truth and subjectivity – ‘you just can’t tell what’s original any more’: ‘Eyes on the Prize’, Intelligent Life, The Quarterly from The Economist, 4 (2010), 79. On the scientificity of historians, see Hayden White, ‘The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Reply to Dirk Moses’, History and Theory, 44 (2005), 333–8.

8 On how scientists, past and present, make up scientific objectivity according to epistemic virtues, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

9 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

10 Barry Barnes ‘Elusive Memories of Technoscience’, Perspectives on Science, 13 (2005), quoted in Forman, op. cit. (note 4), 5.

11 For example, Margaret Macmillan, The Uses and Abuses of History (London: Profile Books, 2009) who calls for historians to avoid ‘theory’. As Joan W. Scott points out, ‘theory’ in such texts is associated with leftist politics, and ‘objectivity’ its antidote: ‘History-Writing as Critique’, in Jenkins, Morgan and Munslow (eds), op. cit. (note 7), 23.

12 Terry Eagleton and Matthew Beaumont, The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (London: Verso, 2009), 149.

13 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); for a rebuttal, see Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein, ‘Cracking Biopower,’ History of the Human Sciences, 23 (2010), 109–28.

14 Steve Fuller, audio lecture, ‘Warwick “Human Futures” Seminar on Chris Renwick’s “Biology and the Making of British Sociology”’, 21 October 2010, online: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/academicstaff/sfuller/fullers_index/audio, accessed 25 January 2011. For Fuller’s unblushing praise of the blatantly biological and neurological reductionist account of history proffered by Daniel Lord Smail (cited below), see his review in Interdisciplinary Science Review, 34 (2009), 389–92.

15 For stunning examples, see David Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), and Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). For various critical perspectives on contemporary ‘brain-centricity’, see the essays in the special issue of History of the Human Sciences, 23 (2010); and Max Stadler, ‘The Neuroromance of Cerebral History’, ‘The Neuroromance of Cerebral History’, in Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby (eds), Critical Neuroscience: Between Lifeworld and Laboratory (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).

16 Interdisciplinarity has been described by the sociologist Peter Weingart as, at best, the ‘result of opportunism in knowledge production’. Peter Weingart, ‘Interdisciplinarity: The Paradoxical Discourse’, in Peter Weingart and Nico Stehr (eds), Practising Interdisciplinarity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), cited in Post, ‘Debating Disciplinarity’, op. cit. (note 5), 755. See also James Chandler, ‘Introduction: Doctrines, Disciplines, Discourses, Departments’, Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009), 739–40.

17 On the merits of ‘dissensus’ over intellectual consensus, see Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 115ff.

18 Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1918), http://www.ne.jp/asahi/moriyuki/abukuma/weber/lecture/science_frame.html, accessed 25 January 2011, 3, see also 12 on modern medicine and its humanist presuppositions.

19 Roger Cooter, ‘The Traffic in Victorian Bodies: Medicine Literature and History’, Victorian Studies, 45 (2003), 513–27.

20 Roger Cooter, ‘The Turn of the Body: History and the Politics of the Corporeal’, Arbor Ciencia, Pensamiento y cultur, 186 (2010), 393–405.

21 See: David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Gregory Elliott (trans.), (London: Verso, 2005).

22 See, for example, the concluding pages of Mary Fissell, ‘Making Meaning from the Margins: The New Cultural History of Medicine’ in Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (eds), Locating Medical History: The Stories and their Meanings (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 364–89.

23 Which is precisely what Kuhn asserted in the 1960s for the continued practice of science in the face of his own exposure of it as socially and culturally contingent: Kuhn, quoted in Georg Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 120. For Iggers this was not a necessary move for historians in the 1990s. Such, I hazard, is the difference between his times (fighting the literary turn) and ours (fighting for survival).

24 On the value of critique, see Judith Butler, ‘Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity’, Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009), 773–95; and Scott, op. cit. (note 11), 19–38. On historical wisdom, see W.T. Mitchell, ‘Art, Fate, and the Disciplines: Some Indicators’, Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009), 1026–7.

25 Although Rosenberg is one of the few historians of medicine to express in print the current need to pause over the shared values and assumptions of fellow practitioners, he can only assert that ‘To be effective historians must maintain their disciplinary identity, their own criteria of achievement and canons of excellence’: ‘Anticipated Consequences: Historians, History, and Health Policy’, in his Our Present Complain: American Medicine, Then and Now (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 203.