Lecture 2: What is Medical History?

Question 1

Name a few ways that the history of health is different from the history of medicine?

Answer 1

• medicine seems more prestigious than health
• health can be more individualized, medicine more professional
• Health is more social or cultural, medicine is more scientific
• health outcomes are different form place to place, time to time. Medicine is more universal.

Question 2

What’s the World Health Organization defined health as?

Answer 2

A state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

Question 3

Does medicine define health?

Answer 3

No

Question 4

Should we study the history of health or the history of medicine? Does it matter?

Answer 4

How would we know about breakthrough medical discoveries if it did not improve health?

Question 5

Traditionally, who predominately wrote medical history?

Answer 5

doctors as they recorded important discoveries, innovations. They also recorded information about the leaders in medicine.

Question 6

Why did doctors record medical history?

Answer 6

It was important to commemorate achievements as well as record them, and medical biographies gave medical students and junior physicians role models.

Question 7

Who was William Osler?

Answer 7

A Canadian physician and one of he four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Question 8

Who is considered the father of modern medicine?

Answer 8

Sir William Osler

Question 9

What does William Osler use as an inspiration? How?

Answer 9

History as an inspiration.
Combined history and medicine because he would argue that we should use history to inspire young doctors to do great things.

Question 10

What is William Osler’s concept of “books and bedside”?

Answer 10

• Reading and listening

- Being at the bedside. Hands on.

Question 11

What was history used as a critical device for? 2 examples?

Answer 11

Interpreting the relationship between medicine and society and informing policy.

• i.e to understand the effects of disease on a population
• the power of doctors over patients

Question 12

When did Henry Sigerist live from? Where was he born? Where did he receive his MD and when?

Answer 12

• 1891-1957, born in Paris

- MD from Zurich in 1917

Question 13

When was Henry Sigerist director at JHU Institute for the History of Medicine?

Answer 13

1932-47

Question 14

What did Sigerist encourage medical students to study?

Answer 14

disease patterns over time

Question 15

What were the main things Sigerist believed impacted disease outcomes? What did he refer to these things as?

Answer 15

-wealth
-nutrition
-literacy
“Social determinants of health”

Question 16

Sigerist saw health as a___device or right of___.

Answer 16

• political

- citizenship

Question 17

What was Sigerist known for?

Answer 17

His controversial views on “socialized” medicine.

Question 18

What Sigerist a political advocate for equality?

Answer 18

yes

Question 19

Who was Thomas McKeown (1912-1988)?

Answer 19

British physician and medical historian

Question 20

What did Thomas McKeown believe medicine had a limited impact on?

Answer 20

improving the health of a population
-he was radical for arguing that medicine does a terrible job of improving our health outcomes. He said that social things have a larger impact.

Question 21

What did Thomas McKeown believe had nothing to do with high or low death rate? What did he believe played a role?

Answer 21

• Major advancements in medicine had nothing to do with it.

- It had to do with levels of wealth in society.

Question 22

What did Thomas McKeown believe in?

Answer 22

• nutrition (changing agricultural practices improved nutrition)
• general wealth
• water quality and sewage disposal
• public health and sanitation

Question 23

By the___social historians (PhDs, not MDs) increasingly examined history of medicine.

Answer 23

1970s

Question 24

What was the social history of medicine less/more interested in?

Answer 24

• Less interested in “great discovers, doctors, etc.”
• More interested in expanded concepts of health, populations, and organized medicine. The ways the that health/medicine shaped culture (race, class , gender)

Question 25

In what ways were social historians critical of organized medicine?

Answer 25

• some argued that the “medicalization” of society led to the empowerment of doctors over patients
• Technology in the hospital benefited doctors, but made patients into automatons, or objects of medicine rather than its subjects.
• (critical recuasse they wanted to contextualize the guys that made discoveries)

Question 26

Who do social historians believe we should look more at to understand the history of medicine?

Answer 26

They look more at patient. How should we understand the history of medicine if we look at it from the patient’s perspective?

Question 27

With medical history, who is there a division between within the discipline?

Answer 27

Between the histories that celebrate “great moments”, “great doctors” and “great discoveries” and histories that focus on the intersections of medicine/health and society/culture.

Question 28

What has the split within the history of medicine reflected a split between what two groups?

Answer 28

MD-historians and PhD-historians

Question 29

What did the long tradition of recording the history of medicine focus on?

Answer 29

-Professional developments (technologies, discoveries, “great doctors”)

Question 30

What did the relatively shorter tradition of history of health and medicine focus on?

Answer 30

-public health and medicine in relation to society (social determinant of health–nutrition,e education, wealth, sanitation)