Historiography of biomedicine: "bio," "medicine," and in between

ISIS

Volumn 102, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 116-122

  Löwy, Ilana ^a  

^a CERMES   (France)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; BIOMEDICINE; HISTORY; HUMAN; SCIENCE; SOCIAL STATUS; TECHNOLOGY;

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE DISCIPLINES; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; SCIENCE; SOCIAL CONDITIONS; TECHNOLOGY;

EID: 79955121290     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/658661     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. Alan Gregg, "Henry E. Sigerist: His Impact on American Medicine," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1948, 22:32.
2. On the relationship between Sigerist and Gregg see Theodore M. Brown, "Friendship and Philanthropy: Henry Sigerist, Alan Gregg, and the Rockefeller Foundation," in Making Medical History: The Life and Times of Henry E. Sigerist, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 288-312.
3. Today some historians use the term "biomedicine" to describe nineteenth-century Western science-based medicine; see, e.g., Shruti Kapila, "The Enchantment of Science in India," Isis, 2010, 101:120-132.
4. Christopher Lawrence, "Incommunicable Knowledge: Science, Technology, and the Clinical Art in Britain, 1850-1914," Journal of Contemporary History, 1985, 20:503-520.
5. Morris Vogel and Charles Rosenberg, eds., The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1979).
6. John Harley Warner, "Therapeutic Explanation and the Edinburgh Bloodletting Controversy: Two Perspectives on the Medical Meaning of Science in the Mid-Nineteenth Century," Medical History, 1980, 24:241-258.
7. Bruno Latour, The Pasteruzation of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (1984; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988).
8. George Weisz, Divide and Conquer: A Comparative History of Medical Specialization (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005).
9. The term "biomedicine" was initially linked to U.S. programs on military and civil applications of radioactive compounds. Later, its growing popularity reflected the increasing homogenization of techniques used to study healthy and sick bodies. See Timothy Lenoir and Marguerite Hays, "The Manhattan Project for Biomedicine," in Controlling Our Destinies, ed. Philip Sloan (South Bend, Ind.: Univ. Notre Dame Press, 2000), pp. 29-63.
10. Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio, "Does Biomedicine Entail the Successful Reduction of Pathology to Biology?" Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 2004, 47:357-371.
11. Soraya de Chadarevian and Harmke Kamminga, eds., Molecularizing Biology and Medicine: New Practices and Alliances, 1910s-1970s (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1998).
12. For the big picture see Roger Cooter and John V. Pickstone, Medicine in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Harwood, 2000).
13. For more focused studies see Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, eds., The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992).
14. Robert Bud, The Uses of Life: History of Biotechnology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).
15. John Harley Warner, "Science in Medicine," Osiris, 1985, 2nd Ser., 1:37-58.
16. For the "biomedicalization" of medicine see Adele E. Clarke et al., "Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine," American Sociological Review, 2003, 68:161-194.
17. On changes within the history of medicine see Susan Reverby and David Rosner, "'Beyond the Great Doctors' Revisited: A Generation of the 'New' Social History of Medicine," in Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, ed. Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 167-193.
18. Warner, "The History of Science and the Sciences of Medicine," Osiris, 1995, 2nd Ser., 10:164-193.
19. On the practice turn in history of recent biology see Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, "Recent Science and Its Exploration: The Case of Molecular Biology," Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2009, 40:6-12.
20. See, e.g., Lorraine Daston, "Science Studies and the History of Science," Critical Inquiry, 2009, 35:798-813.
21. E.g., Erwin Ackerknecht, "The Role of Medical History in Medical Education," Bull. Hist. Med., 1947, 21:135-146.
22. Henry Sigerist, "Medical History in the United States: Past, Present, Future," Bull. Hist. Med., 1948, 22:47-64.
23. George Rosen, "Towards a Historical Sociology of Medicine," Bull. Hist. Med., 1958, 32:500-517.
24. Richard Shryock, "The Historian Looks at Medicine," Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, 1937, 5:887-894.
25. Charles Rosenberg, "Erwin Ackerknecht, Social Medicine, and the History of Medicine," Bull. Hist. Med., 2007, 81:511-532, on p. 526.
26. See Ludwik Fleck, "Science and Social Context," Przeglad Wspolczesny, 1939, 18:8-14.
27. Tadeusz Bilikiewicz, "Comments on Ludwik Fleck's 'Science and Social Context,'" Przeglad Wspolczesny, pp. 149-156.
28. Fleck, "Rejoinder to the Comments of Tadeusz Bilikiewicz," Przeglad Wspolczesny, pp. 168-174.
29. Bilikiewicz, "Reply to Rejoinder by Ludwik Fleck," Przeglad Wspolczesny, pp. 189-190.
30. For an English translation of this exchange see Ilana Löwy, The Polish School of Philosophy of Medicine: From Tytus Chalubinski to Ludwik Fleck (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), pp. 249-275. Thanks to Sigerist's support, Bilikiewicz obtained a Rockefeller Foundation grant to write his Ph.D. dissertation in history of medicine.
31. see Bilikiewicz, "Reminiscences autobiographiques," Kwartanik Historii Nauki i Techniki, 1978, 23:3-51.
32. Fleck's conviction that contemporary science is no less dependent on specific thought styles than the science of earlier periods did not undermine his faith in the key role of science in promoting freedom, democracy, and human well-being. See Ludwik Fleck, "Crisis in Science," in Cognition and Fact: Materials on Ludwik Fleck, ed. Robert Cohen and Thomas Schnelle (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986), pp. 153-158.
33. Thomas Söderqvist, "Who Will Sort Out the Hundred or More Paul Ehrlichs? Remarks on the Historiography of Recent and Contemporary Technoscience," in The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology, ed. Söderqvist (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997), pp. 1-18, on p. 3.
34. For work on biomedicine from a number of fields see, e.g., Patrice Pinell, The Fight against Cancer: France, 1890-1940 (1992; London: Routledge, 2002).
35. Adele E. Clarke, Disciplining Reproduction: American Life Sciences and the "Problem of Sex" (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1998).
36. Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995).
37. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities and the Science of Memory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995). The sociologist Renée Fox wrote several books with the medical historian Judith Swazey; the sociologist Alberto Cambrosio teamed with the historian of medicine Peter Keating.
38. On the relatively restrained scope of publications in medical history journals see Olga Amsterdamska and Anja Hiddinga, "Trading Zones or Citadels: Professionalization and Intellectual Change in the History of Medicine," in Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, ed. Huisman and Warner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 237-261.
39. E.g., Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating, Exquisite Specificity: The Monoclonal Antibody Revolution (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995).
40. Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Inventer la biomédicine: La France, l'Amérique et la production des savoirs du vivant (Paris: La Découverte, 2002).
41. Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2008).
42. E.g., Nelly Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeology of Sex Hormones (London: Routledge, 1994).
43. Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998).
44. Lara Marks, Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2001).
45. Alice Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003).
46. Joanna Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003).
47. E.g., Harry Marks, The Progress of Experiment: Science and Therapeutic Reform in the United States (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997).
48. Jordan Goodman and Vivien Walsh, Taxol: Nature and Politics in the Pursuit of Cancer Drugs (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).
49. Adriana Petryna, Andrew Lakoff, and Arthur Kleinman, Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2006).
50. Jeremy Greene, Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2007).
51. Christoph Gradmann and Jonathan Simon, eds., Evaluating and Standardizing Therapeutic Agents, 1890-1950 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
52. On the difficulties of studying living scientists see Thomas Söderqvist, "Who Will Sort Out the Hundred or More Paul Ehrlichs? Remarks on the Historiography of Recent and Contemporary Technoscience," in The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology, ed. Söderqvist (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997), pp. 1-18, on p. 3.
53. See, e.g., Soraya de Chadarevian, "Using Interviews to Write History of Science," in Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology, ed. Söderqvist, pp. 51-70.
54. Jean-Paul Gaudillière, "The Living Scientist Syndrome: Memory and History of Molecular Regulation," Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology, pp. 109-128. Sociologists and anthropologists who study clinical settings tend to be more concerned about methodological and ethical aspects of their studies than about the reconstruction of the "correct" story.
55. Paul Rabinow, "Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality," in Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 91-110.
56. Adam M. Hedgecoe and Paul A. Martin, "Genomics, STS, and the Making of Sociotechnical Futures," in The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd ed., ed. Edward J. Hackett et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 817-838, esp. pp. 828-829.
57. George Sarton, "The History of Science versus the History of Medicine," Isis, 1935, 23:313-320, on p. 319.
58. Henry Sigerist, "History of Medicine and the History of Science: An Open Letter to George Sarton, Editor of Isis," Bull. Inst. Hist. Med., 1936, 4:1-13, on p. 5.
59. In practice, historians of medicine and science often worked together. For example, in 1946 the History of Science Society was headed by the medical historian Richard Shryock, who played a key role in saving the society's journal, Isis, from closing. See I. Bernard Cohen, "The Isis Crisis and the Coming of Age of the History of Science Society," Isis, 1999, 90:S28-S42, esp. p. S31.
60. In the 1980s several "traditional" historians of medicine bemoaned the growing distance between medicine and its historians. See Lloyd Stevension, "A Second Opinion," Bull. Hist. Med., 1980, 54:134-140.
61. Leonard Wilson, "Medical History without Medicine," Journal of the History of Medicine, 1980, 35:5-7.
62. Saul Jarcho, "Some Observations and Opinions of the Present State of American Medical Historiography," Journal of the History of Medicine, 1989, 44:288-290.
63. Regarding the particular focus on laboratories see Warner, "The History of Science and the Sciences of Medicine," Osiris, 1995, 2nd Ser., 10, pp. 189-193.
64. For some exceptions to the generalization see, e.g., Christiane Sinding, Le clinicien et le chercheur: Des grandes maladies de la carence à la médecine moleculaire (Paris: Presses Univ. France, 1991).
65. Christopher Feudtner, Bittersweet: Diabetes, Insulin, and the Transformation of Illness (Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 2003).
66. Christiane Sinding, "The Power of Norms: Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, and the History of Medicine," in Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, ed. Huisman and Warner ((Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004)), pp. 262-284.