What is Medical History?

Question 1

Rosenberg (1989), disease as social phenomenon

Answer 1

Disease does not exist as social phenomenon in our culture until we agree that it does
Labelling of certain behaviours as disease even when somatic basis remains unclear - alcoholism, homosexuality, ‘hyperactivity’

Question 2

Rosenberg (1989), disease as frame

Answer 2

Disease as social actor and mediator:

• Role played by laymen as well as physicians in shaping the total experience of sickness
• Act of diagnosis itself as key event
• Each disease invested w unique configuration of social characteristics
• Social centrality of disease concepts and social signif of diagnoses = deeply embedded in human hist

Question 3

Jackson, social constructionism

Answer 3

while it certainly allows us to understand diagnosis as a social process, one that is relational and culturally spe- ciic, social constructionism has contributed less obviously to the history of disease, since it tends to minimise the biological parameters of disease and diminish histor- ical interest in everyday, lived experiences of illness, pain and death.

Question 4

Jackson, on Rosenberg

Answer 4

alternative historiographical framework that more speciically addresses the challenges raised by writing histories of disease is Charles Rosenberg’s concept of ‘framing’. In a series of publications in the 1980s and 1990s, Rosenberg rejected the belief that diseases can be readily reduced to stable organic entities, arguing for a more complex and luid understanding of how diseases have been ‘framed’ historically: Disease is at once a biological event, a generation-speciic repertoire of ver- bal constructs relecting medicine’s intellectual and institutional history, an aspect of and potential legitimation for public policy, a potentially deining element of social role, a sanction for cultural norms, and a structuring ele- ment in doctor/patient interactions.20 Deliberately distancing his approach from ‘social constructivism’, a term that he regarded as tautological and overly associated with particular forms of cultural crit- icism, Rosenberg encouraged historians to use the ‘less programmatically charged metaphor’ of framing to challenge the plausibility of medical models, to expose more convincingly the ways in which ‘framing options are not equally available’ to every- one, to recognise the role of diseases as ‘actors’ in social processes, and to re-evaluate claims that medicalisation is necessarily part of ‘an oppressive ideological system’