The Development and Present State of History of Medicine in Britain

The Development and Present State of History of Medicine in Britain(*) JOHN V. PICKSTONE (**) SUMMARY Introduction. l.-Institutional histories. 2.-Map of Intellectual Developments. 2.1.-Inputs from history and sociology of science. 2.2.-Social history. 2.3.-Demography, Sociology of medicine, Sociology, radical Psychiatry etc. 2.4.-From the 1980s. 3.-Now and hereafter? 4.-Conclusions? ABSTRACT This is a personal account of scholarship in the history of medicine in Britain, from the 1960s onwards, drawn from recollections and knowledge of the literature. The institutional development of the subject is reviewed, emphasizing the contributions of the Wellcome Trust; the various modes of historical research and writing are surveyed and assessed. Modest suggestions are made for renewing the historiography of medical sciences and technologies-to contribute to the politics of knowledge and to wider histories. BIBLID [0211-9536(1999) 19; 457-4861 Fecha de aceptación: 7 de enero de 1999 (*) First prepared for the Conference of the Spanish Society for the History of Medicine, Granada, 25-26 April, 1997, and amended up to December 1998. (**) Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, and Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester. DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hzst. Illus. 1999, 19, 457-486. 458 JOHN V. PICKSTONE 1 am asked to review the present state of scholarship in history of medicine in Britain. The account must inevitably be a personal one. 1 shall be speaking from a mixture of recollection and knowledge of the literature; 1 cannot even claim that degree of objectivity which might be attained by submitting this text to a wide variety of my British colleagues (1). Simply to survey the practice of history of medicine in the present would mean little. To understand, you must see the way in which the components of this discipline have been assembled, and the ways in which they have interacted, and continue to interact. Essentially this is a story which much go back at least to the 1960s. 1 propose to te11 it in two versions which 1 hope are complementary: First 1 shall give an account of the institutional development of the subject and the various kinds of departments and units in which it has been nurtured. Then aftenvards 1 shall try to give an intellectualist account of the various modes of historical research and historical writing which have been developed in Britain in the past 40 years. 1. INSTITUTIONAL HISTORIES Until the 1960s, history of medicine in Britain was a very small activity. Of course, doctors had long practised a kind of history for their own purposes. This tradition of celebrating institutions, great doctors, particular theories, or particular surgical operations continues to the present and will doubtless continue for the foreseeable future; but it has had relatively little contact with professional history or indeed with any of the humanities or social sciences as they have been practised within universities. For history of medicine as a university discipline, the first professional in Britain was Charles Singer, appointed to Oxford by William Osler, and then to the anatomy department of University College London (1) 1 have however benefited from the comments of Anna Mayer, HPS, Cambridge, who is researching the history of history of science in Britain. And see her ~Moralizing science; the uses of science's past in national education in the 1920s*, British Journal for the Histoiy o/ Science, 30, 1997, 51-70. DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Rlus. 1999, 19, 457-486. The Development and Present State of History of Medicine in Britain 459 under Grafton Elliot-Smith, whose vision of the subject included archaeology and Egyptology, in which fields he was a major proponent of the «diffusion theory.. He was also a major advocate of clinical uses of anatomy, and of links with physical anthropology, psychology and religious studies. He was interested enough in medicine's history (in diffusion and in revolutionary geniuses) to appoint a historian to the department (2). One of the many people accustomed to cal1 on Grafton Elliot-Smith at Gower Street was Sir Henry Wellcome, the Arnerican born pharmacist and chemical manufacturer, who by the 1930s had made his fortune in Britain. Wellcome had been briefly and unhappily married; he devoted most of his spare time and money to amassing huge collections of medical books and artefacts. Crateloads were shipped to London; many were unpacked only after Sir Henry's death in 1936. His legacy set up a Trust and required that some of the continuing profits from his pharmaceutical company should go to the support of history of medicine (alongside the much larger amount which supported medical research.) Wellcome had already built an Institute on Euston Road, initially to house his company as well as his laboratories and his collections. The importance of that Institute and of Wellcome's legacy for the history of medicine can scarcely be over estimated (3). In a later section of this paper, 1 shall return to the influence of the Wellcome Trust, and especially its rapid expansion since the 1970s, but first 1 want to discuss some of the other institutional and social factors which have allowed and encouraged the development of history of medicine in Britain since the Second World War. Almost al1 historical disciplines depend very heavily on universities, and the 1960s and early 1970s saw a great expansion of British universities. History of medicine was NOT developed as a special field, but it benefited considerably from new provision for history of science. The majority of (2) Singer lectured at UCL from 1919. See SMEATON, W.A. History of science at University College London: 1919-47, British Journal for the History of Science, 1997, 30, 25-28. 1 am also grateful to Anna Mayer and to Andrew Be11 for information about Singer and Grafton Elliott-Smith respectively. (3) See HALL, A.R; BEMBRIDGE, B.A. Physic and philanthropy. A history of the Wellcome Trust, 1936-1986, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986. DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. lllus. 1999, 19, 457-486. 460 JOHN V. PICKSTONE professional historians of medicine now active in Britain have trained in history of science groups, and until recent years they came largely from backgrounds in biomedical sciences-though only a handful were trained in medicine, and medical schools have not been an important support of the subject (though that too is changing). These structural features are partly shared with American history of medicine, but contrast strongly with the patterns in most of continental Europe. Between the wars there had been only one department of history of science, founded at University College London in 1921-22 (4). At Carnbridge a department of history and philosophy of science was started in the 50s, from four roots-the social and historical interests of certain scientists and doctors (eg. the Marxists Joseph Needham and J. D. Bernal, and the émigré Walter Pagel), the collection of scientifíc instruments supported by Robert Whipple of Cambridge Scientific Instruments Ltd, the excursions into history of science by the general historian Herbert Butterfield and some of his protégés, and the interest in philosophy of science among professional philosophers, notably Braithwaite (5). Butterfield and the theologian Charles Raven took control from the scientists and the first appointment in the subject went to a historian, Rupert Ha11 (6). At Leeds, the philosopher Stephen Toulmin and the historian Asa Briggs set up a group within the Philosophy Department. Later, at Lancaster and at Sussex, history of science groups were created within the history departments/schools of new universities; but most of the new groups were set up as independent departments in existing universities. Especially in technical universities such as Imperial College London (under Rupert Hall) and UMIST in Manchester (from 1963, under Donald Cardwell), they were meant to give a liberal education to scientists and engineers who, might thereby be expected to play larger roles in business, admiriistration and politics. Here we recall that very English debate over the so-called two cultures that was conducted in the early 1960s (4) See SMEATON (fn. 2). (5) See BENNETT, J.A. Museums and the establishment of history of science at Oxford and Cambridge, Bntish Journal for the Histov of Science, 1997, 30, 29-46. (6) 1 am guided here by the ongoing work of Anna Mayer. DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 1999, 1% 457-486. The Development and Present State of History of Medicine in Britain 46 1 between the scientist-politician-novelist C. P. Snow and the puritanical literary critic F. R. Leavis (7). A few years later, from the mid 60s, this same concern with the place of science in economic and political life was to give rise to a second generation of university initiatives, including the Science Studies Unit at Edinburgh, directed by David Edge (where Barry Barnes, David Bloor and Steven Shapin developed the ~strong programmen in sociology of scientific knowledge), the department of Liberal Studies in Science in Manchester University (F.R. Jevons), the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University (Chris Freeman), and to some. extent the proliferation of the sociology of science in sociology departments, notably at Bath (Harry Collins) and York (Michael Mulkay). In general, medicine was marginal to these activities, though the new departments included a few historians of biology and/or medical sciences. There was no corresponding move to give a liberal education to medical students and no historians of medicine were appointed to medical faculties. The British medical schools, unlike those in the USA, select their students at age 18, and until the 1990s they subjected them to intensive training programmes which were largely isolated from the rest of the university. Until the 1990s, attempts to broaden the curriculum largely failed. There was however some expansion of social medicine and of medical sociology, which provided jobs for a few public-health doctors and/or sociologists with critica1 and historical interests. Notable examples were Thomas McKeown, Professor of Social Medicine at Birmingham, who from the 1950s developed a persistently influential argument about the marginality of clinical medicine to the mortality decline in the 19th and early 20th centuries: and more recently, David Armstrong at Guy's Medical School London, whose accounts of modern general practice are deeply Foucauldian. From the 19'70s there has been some useful synergy between medical history and medical sociology section of the British Sociological Association, partly at the leve1 of temporary researchers (common in social sciences), and also because (7) On C.P. Snow see the article by David Edgerton, forthcoming in the Bntish Journal for the Histoly of Science, special number, Presenting Science's Past, 1999. DYNAMIS. Acta Hzsp. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 1999, 19, 457-486. 462 JOHN V. PICKSTONE severa1 key sociologists in the generation now retiring used medical history in their books (especially Margaret Stacey and Margot Jeffreys). This tradition continues in the excellent textbooks produced by the Open University, which have included very useful chapters by historians, notably by Charles Webster and his colleagues at the Oxford Wellcome Unit (8). But far more important for the history of medicine than any of the developments so far enumerated, was the expansion of the Wellcome Trust support, partly through scholarships but especially through the development of the five key institutions. Here 1 refer to the Wellcome Institute in London, which links the Wellcome Library and the Academic Unit at University College London, and also to the four Wellcome Units outside London-in Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow (Scotland) and Manchester. In giving brief histories, it is useful to begin with the Units in Cambridge and Oxford; from there 1 will go on to discuss the Wellcome Institute in London and the developments in Scotland and in Manchester . About 1970, the Wellcome Trust explored the possibility of setting up University Units: Cambridge and Oxford took up the offer. The Cambridge Wellcome Unit was set up within the department of History and Philosophy of Science which was already well known for its work in an intellectualist tradition oriented to epistemological and methodological questions. The first head of the Wellcome Unit, Robert Young, had different ambitions; he was a psychologist turned historian of science and a political radical. Through his early work on the history of cerebral localisation, and especially through his work on Darwinism, Young stressed social context and the analysis of ideas as part of political cultures. It is difficult to overestimate the intellectual importance of Young's presence in Cambridge, short though it was. In alliance with a (8) STACEY, Margaret. The sociology ojhealth and healing: A textbook, London, Routledge, 1991; BLACK, N.; BOSWELL, D.; GRAY, A.; MURPHY, S.; POPAY, J. Health and disease. A reader, Milton Keynes, Open .University Press, 1984 (revised edition 1993); WEBSTER, C. (ed.) Caring jor health: history and diversity, Milton Keynes, 0pen University Press, 1993; BEATTIE, A.; GOTT, M.; JONES, L.; SIDELL, M. Health and well-being: a reader, Basingstoke, Macmillan Press in association with Open University Press, 1993. DYNAMZS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. illus. 1999, 19, 457-486. The Development and Present State of History of Medicine in Britain 463 number of other Cambridge historians working especially in the history of politics, Young showed how to develop a history of science which would be critica1 and contextualist (9). It was very much a 60s development, but to list Young's pupils and associates in Cambridge is to enumerate a substantial proportion of the most productive and original scholars who have worked in British history of science and in medicine since the '70s. Some of them reacted against, or bore lightly, the impress of Young's radicalism-here one might count Bill Bynum (lo), who went on to build the Academic Unit of the Wellcome Institute in London; John Durant, now a senior figure in the (London) Science Museum; and Roy porter, a Cambridge history graduate who did his PhD on the history of geology. Closer to Young were Karl Figlio (ll), who followed Young into psychotherapy; Ludmilla Jordanova, who has since contributed substantially to studies of gender and representation in the history of medicine (12); Roger Smith, who continues to work on the history of behavioural sciences and on forensic medicine at the University of Lancaster (13); Roger Cooter, who wrote his PhD on phrenology and (9) YOUNG, R. M., Danuin's metaphor. Nature's place in Victorian culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985. (10) BYNUM, W.F. Science and thepractice of medicine in the nineteenth century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. (11) FIGLIO, K. The metaphor of organization: an historiographical perspective on the bio-medical sciences of the early nineteenth century, History of Science, 1976, 14, 17-53; FIGLIO, K. Chlorosis and chronic disease in nineteenth-century Britain: the social constitution of somatic illness in a capitalist society, Social History, 1978, 3, 167-197; FIGLIO, K. How does illness mediate social relations? Workmen's compensation and medico-legal practices, 1890-1940, in WRIGHT, P.; TREACHER, A. (ed.) The problem of medical knowledge. Examining the social construction of medicine, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1982, 174-224. (12) JORDANOVA, L. Sexual Visions: Images of gender in science and medicine between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. (13) SMITH, R. Trial by medicine: insanity and responsibility in Victorian trials, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press,'l981; SMITH, R. Inhibition: history and meaning in the sciences of mind and brain, London, Free Association Books, 1992; SMITH, R. The Fontana history of the human sciences, London, Fontana Press, 1997. Roger Smith was the seminal figure for a series of excellent studies on forensic medicine, for example, the recent collection by Michael Clark and Cathy Crawford, and Mark Jackson on infanticide: CLARK, M.; CRAWFORD, C. Legal medicine in history, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994; JACKSON, M. New-born child murder: DYNAMIS. Acta Hisfi. Med. Sci. Hist. illus. 1999, 19, 457-486. 464 JOHN V. PICKSTONE popular science in early nineteenth-century England before moving to Oxford (fringe medicine) and Manchester (orthopaedics, children, accidents, labour, and war) (14); Maureen McNeil who worked on cultural history of lgth century science and more recently on topics related to reproduction (15); and Edward Yoxen, who did important work on the history and sociology of molecular biology and genetics when in the 1970s and 80s he lectured in Manchester in Liberal Studies in Science (16). In 1974 Roger French became director in Cambridge where he worked on medieval and early modern medicine (17), ably and persistently supported by Andrew Cunningham (18). Latterly, Harmke Kamminga (19) has helped establish research on biomedical sciences, especially on the Cambridge research schools which have been central to British physiology, biochemistry and molecular biology. women, illegitimacy and the courts in eighteenth-century England, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996. (14) COOTER, R. The cultural meaning of popular science: phrenology and the organization of consent in nineteenth-century Bntain, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984; COOTER, R. Phrenology in the Bntish Zsles: an annotated histoncal biobibliography and index, Metuchen, N.J., Scarecrow Press, 1989; COOTER, R. (ed.) Zn the name of the child; health and welfare, 1880-1940, London, Routledge, 1992; COOTER, R. Surgery and society in peace and war: orthopaedics and the organization of modern medicine, 1880-1948, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1993. (15) MCNEIL, M. Under the banner of science: Erasmus Darwin and his age, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987. (16) YOXEN, E. The gene business: who should control biotechnology ? London, Free Association Press, 1986; YOXEN, E. Constructing genetic diseases, in WRIGHT, P.; TREACHER, A. (ed.) The problem of medical knowledge. Examining the social construction of medicine, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1982, 144161. (17) FRENCH, R. William Hanley 'S natural philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. (18) CUNNINGHAM, A.; GRELL, O. P. (ed.) Medicine and the Reformation, London, Routledge, 1993; CUNNINGHAM, A.; FRENCH, R. The medical enlightenment of the eighteenth century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990; CUNNINGHAM, A.; WILLLAMS, P. (ed.) The laboratory revolution in medicine, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992; CUNNINGHAM, A.; ANDREWS, B. (ed.) Western medicine as contrasted knowledge, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997. (19) KAMMINGA, Harmke; WEATHERALL, M. (ed.) Dynamic science: biochemistry in Cambndge, 1898-1949, Cambridge, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, 1992; KAMMINGA, Harmke; CUNNINGHAM, A. (ed.) The science and culture of nutntion, 1840-1940, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1995. DYNAMZS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. nlus. 1999, 19, 457-486. The Development and Present State of History of Medicine in Britain 465 The central figure at the Oxford Wellcome Unit was Charles Webster, who had trained as a biologist and school teacher, and taken up history partly as an extra-mural lecturer. He had been closely associated with the innovative history of science group at Leeds in the 60s, including Steven Toulmin, Jerry Ravetz, Pyo Rattansi, Maurice Crosland, Donald Cardwell, Jack Morrell and Robert Olby; indeed, Webster initiated the Northern Seminar which, into the 1980s linked Leeds, Lancaster, and UMIST. After moving south to Oxford, Webster continued his studies on 17th century science and medicine (20). But for many years, before and since leaving the Directorship of the Wellcome Unit, he has also been the major historian of the politics of British medicine in the 20th century and the official historian of the National Health Service (21). He developed a notable group of historians, who between them shared the spread of his chronological interest from the Renaissance through to the 20th century. Margaret Pelling is now best known for her detailed studies of early modern healers (22); Paul Weindling as the British expert on German biology and medicine since 1870 (23). At this point we might turn to the Wellcome Institute and to University College London, still a very small operation in the early 1970s when Bill Bynum took over from neurologist turned historian, Edwin Clarke (24). Since then, the London Wellcome has grown enormously, sharing in (20) WEBSTER, C. The great instauration: science, medicine and reform, 1626-1 660, London, Duckworth, 1975. (21) WEBSTER, C. The health seniices since the war. Volume 1: problems of health care: the National Health Service before 1957, London, HMSO, 1988; Volume 2: Government and health care, London, HMSO, 1996. (22) PELLING, M. Choha, fever and English medicine, 1825-1865, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978; and The common lot: sickness, medical occupations and the urban poor in early modm Europe, London and New York, Longman, 1998. (23) WEINDLING, P. (ed.) The social history of occupational health, London, Dover, 1986; WEINDLING, P. Health, race and German politics between national unification and Nazism, 1870-1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989; WEINDLING, P. (ed.) Intemational health organisations and movements, 1918-1939, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995. (24) CLARKE, Edwin (ed.) Modern methods in the history of medicine, London, Athlone Press, 1971; CLARKE, E.; JACYNA, S. Nineteenth-century origins of neuroscient@c concepts, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987. DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 1999, 19, 457-486. 472 JOHN V. PICKSTONE historicisation of philosophy of science summarised in the sequenceKarl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend. This series seemed Anglo-American (though manifestly rooted in Central Europe); the French equivalent was Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. The work of Canguilhem and Foucault was influential among British historians of medicine from the early 1970s, first among those with an interest in French medicine (the wider-fame of Foucault followed the translation of the works on prisons and on sex). Among historical sociologists of science the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas on natural symbols and on grids-andgroups seemed to provide a formal framework linking intellectual with social structures in the manner pioneered by Durkheim (40). The Edinburgh Strong Programme in sociology of knowledge drew on Douglas, Mary Hesse (41) and Thomas Kuhn to set out the philosophical basis for a kind of history of science which would be non-presentist and thoroughly contextual; it would be symmetrical between science-laterjudged-true and science-later-judged-false; it would concentrate on scientific disputes as a means of demonstrating the ways in which the rival programmes could be understood sociologically. The strong programme was to become a prescription for important later work, but for most historians of science who were already writing in the early 1970s, this was not so much a foundation programme, as one which pulled together a series of insights they had already learned-about discontinuities, about context, and, from R.G. Collingwood and /or Canguilhem, about the Pmportance of understanding scientific results as answers to questions (42). (40) DOUGLAS, M. Natural symbols: explorations in cosmology, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1973; OLDROYD, D. R. Grid/group analysis for historians of science, History of Science, 24, 1986, 145-171. (41) HESSE, M. Changing concepts and stable order, Social Studies of Science, 1986, 4, 714-726. (42) CANGUILHEM, G. Zdeology and rationality in the history of the life sciences; Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1988; DELAPORTE, F. (ed.), A vital rationalzst: selected writings from Georges Canguilhem, New York, Zone Books, 1994; COLLINGWOOD, R.G. An autobiography, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1944. DYNAMZS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Zllus. 1999, 19, 457-486. The Development and Present State of History of Medicine in Britain 473 2.2. Social history Here, 1 begin with a personal anecdote. 1 moved from physiology into history and philosophy of science by taking a Masters course at University College London in 1968-69. There 1 heard Popper, Lakatos, and Feyerabend, and 1 read Canguilhem as a historian of biology, but 1 learned little history of medicine and no social history. 1 then did a PhD in (Chelsea College) London, on the development of general physiology in France in the early 19th century, and while researching in Paris 1 discovered the early books of Foucault. But it was not until 1 was a post-doctoral Fellow in the University of Minnesota (USA) from 197173, that 1 studied the social history of medicine and began to understand that history of science could be part of general history or, more specifically, part of social history. The divisions were less marked in America, because of the way in which American history of medicine (much more than history of science) had been integrated into history departments and indeed into courses in American civilisation. The pioneers of this social history of medicine included Richard Shryock (43), and by the 1970s there was a substantial amount of published work-often studies of particular cities or regions-which simply assumed that history of medicine was to be written as part of American social history. 1 learned a similar lesson by indirect contact with the Johns Hopkins School-my Minnesota colleague, Toby Gelfand, a student of Owsei Temkin, was then exploring the surgeons of the lath century and saw his work as part of the social history of France (44). Back in England, 1 tried to use these revelations, when from 1974 1 began to study the history of hospitals in the Manchester region. In many cases this application was rather direct, because for 19th century plebeian movements such as medical botany or certain kinds of homeopathy, there were strong connections between American culture and the culture of Victorian Britain, especially for industrial regions such as Manchester. (43) SHRYOCK, R. H. The development oj modern medicine: an interpretation oj the social and scientzpc jactors involved, New York, Knopf, 1947 and Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1979. (44) GELFAND, T. Projessionalizing modern medicine: Pans surgeons and medical science and institutions in the eighteenth century, Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press, 1980. DYNAMZS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 1999, 19, 457-486. 474 JOHN V. PICKSTONE In any case, my fellow historians at UMIST (especially Donald Cardwell and Wilfred and Kathleen Farrar) (45) were keen on local and social history. Like their Mancunian subjects, they relished the practica1 contexts and viewed philosophical history as rather effete. One need only compare the work of Cardwell and of Arnold Pacey (46) with recent studies in the history of energy physics to see how far they anticipated present concerns with practice and industrial contexts. As mentioned above, historians of science and medicine, perhaps especially those in and from the North of England, were also open to social history as it was then being developed in Britain, partly through urban history (by Jim Dyos at the University of Leicester), partly through oral history, History Workshop Journal, and other forms of history from below capturing the historical experiences of the under-privileged. Pioneers here were Paul Thompson, at the University of Essex, and Raphael Samuel at Ruskin College, the British Trade Union Movement's College at Oxford. Social history was also being developed as a formal subspeciality of British history departments -1eaders included Harold Perkins (University of Lancaster) and his associates in the Social History Society, which often focused on sociologzcal themes such as professionalisation or elites (47). Related to this social history within history departments, was the historiography of welfañe or public administration, some of the best of which had been written by political scientists-for example, the classic books on the history of the British Poor Law, especially the studies on (45) See the series of six articles by W.V. Farrar, K.R. Farrar and E.L. Scott on the Henrys of Manchester appearing in various volumes of Ambix from 1973 through to 1977. (46) CARDWELL, D.S.L. Some factors in the early development of the concepts of power, work and energy, British Journal for the History of Science, 1967, 3, 209-224; CARDWELL, D.S.L. James Joule: a biography, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989; PACEY, A. The maze of ingenuity: ideas and idealism in the development of technology, London, Allen Lane, 1974; PACEY, A. The culture of technology, Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1983. (47) PERKIN, H. The origins of modern English society, 1780-1880, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969; PERKIN, H. The rise of professional society: England since 1880, London, Routledge, 1989. DYNAMZS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 1999, 19, 457-486. The Development and Present State of History of Medicine in Britain 475 Edwin Chadwick, John Simon and public health (48); or to works on the development of the welfare state by historians teaching social administration and social policy, for example Brian Abel-Smith on hospitals. From about 1970 progressivist histories of welfare were being challenged by more critica1 accounts which used theories of social control, and later drew on Foucault. 1 will return to these traditions in relation to the history of psychiatry, but here also mention the work of Jane Lewis on women's history and history of the family, as well as on public health in the 20th century (49). Most of her work was written in the Department of Social Administration at the LSE, long the intellectual headquarters of the British welfare state. 2.3. Demography, Sociology of medicine, Sociology, radical Psychiatry etc. 1 have already mentioned the contributions of social medicine, including Thomas McKeown, whose work proved seminal for debates on mortality, public health measures and nutrition which have linked history of medicine with demography (50). British demographers, especially the Cambridge Population Group under Peter Laslett and Tony Wrigley, have been notable for new and authoritative approaches to long standing conundrums, for example, the components of the boom in British population from the late 18th century through to the lSth (51). Younger demographers such as Richard Smith and Simon Szreter continue to contribute to a lively interplay between historical demographers and historians of medicine, including recent studies of the means by which population statistics were produced -on the workings of the Office of the Registrar General, on changing classification of diseases, on the (48) LEWIS, R. A. Edwin Chadwick and the public health movement, 1832-1854, London, Longmans, 1952; FINER, S. E. The lqe and times of Sir Edwin Chadwick, London, Methuen, 1952; LAMBERT, R. Sir John Simon, 1816-1904: and English social administration, London, MacGibbon & Kee, 1963. (49) LEWIS, J. The politics of motherhood: child and maternal welfare in England, 19001939, London, Croom Helm, 1980. (50) MCKEOWN, T. The modern rise of population, London, Edward Arnold, 1976. (51) WRIGLEY, A.; SCHOFIELD, R. S. The population history of England, 1541-1871, a reconstruction, London, 1981. DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. S&. Hist. Illus. 1999, 19, 457-486. 476 JOHN V. PICKSTONE processes by which causes of death were given on certificates, etc., etc. Oxford and Cambridge have both made important contributions to this field (52). This work links with that of David Armstrong, mentioned previously as an exponent of a Foucauldian historical sociology of medicine. Though he often seems to assume that you can deduce the history of medicine from a series of official classifications of disease, his work has been very stimulating. Most medical sociology on Britain was much more empirical, linked to departments of public health or social medicine, or to nursing or paramedical training. Relatively little medical historical work came from the rapid expansion of (general) sociology departments, excepting the Leicester school of historical sociology, where Nicholas Jewson (53), Ivan Waddington (54) and Sidney Holloway (55) analysed professionalisation-not as a set of traits, but as battles over the divisions of labour and status, etc. The work of Waddington on hospitals and British medicine around 1800 was exemplary. It is worthwhile noting here that Leicester was one of the few British departments to include, from the 1960s, the internar European historical sociology which we associate (52) SZRETER, S. The importance of social intervention in Britain's mortality decline c.1850-1914: a re-interpretation of the role of public health, Social History of Medicine, 1988, 1, 1-37; see also the special issue of Social History of Medzcine, 1991, 4, on aThe General Register Office of England and Wales and the public health movement 1837-1914, a comparative perspective*; SMITH, Richard M. Demography and medicine, in BYNUM, W. F.; PORTER, R. (ed.), Companion encyclopedia of the hist~y of medicine, London, Routledge, 1993, volume 2, pp. 1663-1692; HIGGS, E. The statistical big bang of 1911: ideology, technological innovation and the production of medical statistics, Social History of Medzcine, 1996, 9, 409-426. (53) JEWSON, N. Medical knowledge and the patronage system in the eighteenth century England, Sociology, 1974, 8, 369-385; JEWSON, N. The disappearance of the sick-man from medical cosmology, 1770-1870, Sociology, 1976, 10, 225-244. (54) WADDINGTON, 1. The medical profession in the industrial revolution, Dublin, Gil1 and Macmillan, 1984. (55) HOLLOWAY, S. W. F. The apothecaries act, 1815: a reinterpretation, Medical History, 1966, 10, 107-129, 221-236; HOLLOWAY, S. W. F. Roya1 Phamzaceutical Society of Great Britain 1841-1991: apolitical and social history, London, Pharmaceutical Press, 1991. DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. illus. 1999, 19, 457-486. The Development and Present State of History of Medicine in Britain 477 . with Norbert Elias. This approach only attracted general attention in Britain from the 1980s, when its original proponents had reached the end of their lives. But perhaps it was for Psychiatry that historical studies were most intimately related to developments within medicine and medical services. The anti-psychiatry movement, and the sociological critique of asylums by Goffman et al., helped fue1 a series of historical studies on British asylums, especially the work of Andrew Scull (56). We should also note here the important work on prisons by Michael Ignatieff (57) (which preceded the Foucauldian boom), the pioneering studies of asylum populations by the social historian John Walton (58), the later work by Roy Porter (59), and the studies of psychiatric science by Bill Bynum (60) and by clinicians such as German E. Berrios (61). (56) SCULL, A. Museums of madness: the social organization of insanity in nineteenthcentury England, London, Allen Lane, 1979; SCULL, A. (ed.) Madhouses, maddoctors and madmen: the social history of psychiatry in the Victon'an era, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981; SCULL, A. (ed.) The asylum as Utopia: W.A.F. Browne and the mid-nineteenth century consolidation of psychiatry, London, Routledge, 1990; SCULL, A. The most solitary of afflictions: madness and society in Britain, 1700-1900, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993. (57) IGNATIEFF, M. A just measure of pain: the penitentiary in the industrial revolution, London, Macmillan, 1978. (58) WALTON, J. Casting out and bringing back in Victorian England: pauper lunatics, in BYNUM, W. F.; PORTER, R.; SHEPHERD, M. (ed.), The anatomy of madness: essays in the histoy of psychiatry, London, Tavistock Publications, 1985, volume 2, pp.132-146. (59) PORTER, R. A social history of madness: stories of the insane, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987; PORTER, R. Mindyorg'd manacles: a history of madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency, London, Penguin, 1990; PORTER, R. (ed.), The Faber book of madness, London, Faber and Faber, 1991. (60) BYNUM, W. F. Rationales for therapy in British psychiatry: 1780-1835, Medical History, 1974, 18, 317-334; BYNUM, W. F. Theory and practice in British psychiatry from J. C. Prichard to Henry Maudsley, in OGAWA, T. (ed.), Histoy of Psychiatry, Osaka, Tangiguchi Foundation, 1982, pp.196-216; BYNUM, W. F.; PORTER, R.; SHEPHERD, M. (ed.), The anatomy of madness: essays in the histoly of psychiatry, London, Tavistock Publications, 1985, 3 vols. (61) FREEMAN, Hugh; BERRIOS, German E. 150 years of British psychiatry, London, Gaskell, 1991. DYNAMZS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 1999, 19, 457-486. 478 JOHN V. PICKSTONE As will be clear by now, medical history from the 1970s was able to draw on the new history of scientific ideas (eg Bob Young), on the new social histories of welfare and professions (eg the Leicester group), and on studies of science in the industrial revolution (eg Thackray and Morrell). Indeed, part of the excitement of the 1970s was a feeling of synergy and outreach-of topics and methods coming together to illuminate questions which also mattered in worlds beyond the historical profession. 2.4. From the 1980s 1 want now to deal with some of the tendencies which came to prorninence in the history of medicine during the 1980s, especially issues of gender and of representation. The study of women's history helped open up areas of social history which previously had received relatively little attention-the studies on maternity by Jean Donnison (62), Jane Lewis (63), Ann Oakley (64), Irvine Loudon (65), Hilary Marland (66), and others have been very profitable. The work of Ludmilla Jordanova, has sought to link history of medicine with bodies of theory on gender and on representationsfor example her work on wax models and on William Hunter's depictions of pregnancy (67). There is also a growing literature on masculinities, (62) DONNISON, J. Midwives and medical men: a history of the struggle for the control of childbirth, London, Historical Publications, 1988 (2nd edition). (63) LEWIS, J. The politics of motherhood: child and maternal welfare in England, 19001939, London, Croom Helm, 1980. (64) OAKLEY, A. The captured womb: a history of the medical cure of pregnant women, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1984. (65) LOUDON, 1. Death in childbirth: an international study of maternal cure and maternal mortalzty, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992. (66) MARLAND, H.; RAFFERTY, A. M. (ed.), Midwives, society and childbirth: debates and controversies in the modern period, London, Routledge, 1997. (67) JORDANOVA, L. Gender, generation and science: William Hunter's obstetrical atlas, BYNUM, W. F; PORTER, R. (ed.), William Hunter and the eighteenth-century medical world, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 385-412; JORDANOVA, L. Sexual Visions: Images of gender in science and medicine between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. DYNAMZS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. nlus. 1999, 19, 457-486. The Development and Present State of History of Medicine in Britain 479 to which British-based scholars have contributed. Studies on women doctors and scientists (and on the possibilities of feminist epistemologies in science) are less developed than in the USA, but Mary Ann Elston has ~made notable contributions on women's medical schools and on antivivisection (in which England led the world, not least because of the prominent role of women in these campaigns) (68). Over recent years there has developed a huge literature on the body, which has (sometimes) proved a useful meeting point for scholars from a wide range of older disciplines-from literary studies, art history, anthropology, sociology, geography, and various kinds of history, as well as from new kinds of departments such as cultural studies. Most historians of medicine have interests which they can present as body history, by moving their focus from the historical knowers (eg doctors) to the representations which the knowers produced. That reframing is most useful when it allows different representations to be brought together and/or contrasted. By drawing on a wide range of sources, historians can outline synchronic configurations of understandings (eg various professional and popular understandings of menstruation), or they can highlight transformations of understandings (eg of male-female anatomical differences) . Over questions of representation, historians of medicine link with historians of art and of literature-partly with the British tradition of cultural history, eg Raymond Williams, partly with the newer European forms of literary study for which the standard reference is Derrida, and partly through the American studies of rhetoric which draw on these European sources. The European tradition, directly or via the USA, has been especially influential among recent history graduates who see cultural history as discontinuous with, and in some sense superseding, social history. In as much as historians of science and medicine are now long-practised in the art of situating varieties of knowledges within analysable social configurations, they may prove a useful resource for (68) ELSTON, M. A. Women and anti-vivisection in Victorian England, 1870-1900, in RUPKE, N. A. (ed.), Vivisection in historical perspective, London, Croom Helm, 1987, pp. 259-294. DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. S&. Hist. Illus. 1999, 19, 457-486. 480 JOHN V. PICKSTONE such other scholars as may wish to bridge this needless fracture in the historical profession. My own preference is to add these newer perspectives to the methodological armamentarium already surveyed. Let me illustrate that point from studies on visual representation, pioneered among British historians by Martin Rudwick, the historian of geology (69). In the recent work of my colleague in Manchester, Marcia Pointon, on 18th century portraiture, one can see very nicely the synergy which could be achieved between social history of medicine and the social history of art. Pointon, for example, provides a great deal of material on the changing market for portraits-the extension of the portrait-buyingclasses, as it were, and how they chose to be represented (70). The link with social history of medicine is inviting, since we have learned from Nicholas Jewson and others that much of the elite medicine of the eighteenth century might be regarded as patient-dominated, and that patients who were in a position to choose their doctor may have done so partly because they approved of the philosophy of the doctor or his readiness to adapt himself to the lifestyle preferences of the patient. Here medicine appears, in part, as an individual relating with a technical advisor to affirm a particular identity and a particular representation of the self. How did such medical choices relate to the choice of portrait artist, and to the mode of depiction; how were such relations gendered; and how did they vary with socialclass-position and the increased access of the middle-classes to forms of expertise previously restricted to their betters? In addition to gender and representations in art and in language, we might also mention the turn to study practice and non-literary behaviours which has been prominent in the sociology of science and carried over to some extent, especially in the States, into a kind of historical sociology of medicine which often focuses on particular machines, techniques or (69) RUDWICK, M. Caricature as a source for the history of science: De la Beche's anti-Lyellian sketches of 1831, Isis, 1975, 66,534560; RUDWICK, M. The ernergence of a visual language for geological science, 1760-1840, Histoly of Science, 1976, 14, 149-195. (70) POINTON, M. Hanging the head: portraiture and social formation in eighteenth centuly England, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993. DYNAMIS. Acta Hisfi. Med. Sci. Hist. Illus. 1999, 19, 457-486. The Development and Present State of History of Medicine in Britain 48 1 experimental materials -the sociology of the medical record or the laboratory mouse. These historical techniques, like the scientific techniques they describe, are usually most interesting when applied to wider questions; to my mind they are less satisíying (because relatively obvious) as ends in themselves. Studies of laboratory life, for example, are not very good at situating these laboratories in wider worlds, or of systematically distinguishing between different kinds of laboratories (the pioneering studies of VARIETIES of science, by Richard Whitley (71) and Terry Shinn (72), are widely neglected). It is perhaps rather odd that we continue to accept an undifferentiated sociology of science, slipping easily from Robert Boyle to CERN, though we would not think much of a sociology of manufacturing which failed to distinguish systematically between crafts, workshops, mass-production, and automated plants. As 1 have argued at length elsewhere, the informal distinctions which historians of medicine make between bedside medicine, clinical medicine and laboratory medicine afford a useful means of placing case studies and of developing analytical frameworks which can also be extended to other aspects of science and technology. By such means we may hope to create historical big pictures that link the literary and non-literary practices of medicine with practices outside medicine, in ways that are open to historical explanation (73). During the 70s, most historians of science and medicine felt that they were constantly learning new methods and approaches without discarding the older ones. Some of the historians importing new tools from cultural studies seem also to acquire a tendency to sectarianism and the pursuit of fashion. Such tendencies should be resisted, not least because they limit scholarly debate. (71) WHITLEY, R. The Zntellectual and Social Organisation of the Sciences, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984. (72) SHINN, T. Scientific disciplines and organisational specificity: the social and cognitive configurations of laboratory activities, in Norbert Elias, Herminio Martins and Richard Whitley, eds, Scientific establishrnents and hierarchies. Sociology of the Sciences, vol 4, 1982, 239-264. (73) PICKSTONE, J. V. Ways of knowing: towards a historical sociology of science, technology and medicine, British Joumal for the History of Science, 1993, 26, 433-458. DYNAMIS. Acta Hisp. Med. Sci. Hist. Zllus. 1999, 19, 457-486.