Patients and Practitioners

We have histories of diseases but not of health, biographies of doctors but not of the sick. Admittedly, in recent years in particular, a barrage of attacks has been mounted against the ways scholars have traditionally conceived the history of medicine. The discipline (critics allege) has been too Whiggish, too scientistic, either deliberately fostering or at least unconsciously underwriting myths of the triumphal cavalcade of scientific medicine. And in response strenuous counter attempts have been made to ‘demystify’ medical history, and to promote research oriented towards new ways of seeing, in particular examining the socio-cultural construction of medical knowledge and medicine's role within wider networks of ideology and power. As yet, however, these winds of change have rarely led to much attention being paid to the objects of medicine, the recipients of ‘the clinical gaze’, the sufferers.

Indeed, perhaps ironically, these new and critical forays into medical history often end up by silently reinforcing that old stereotype of the sick, i.e. their basic invisibility. Traditional history of medicine simply ignored the patient. After all, it was what the doctor did to, and for, the sick that counted; the patient was just the raw material, the unwitting bearer of a disease or lesion. After all, no one ever suggested that historians of sculpture should concentrate on slabs of marble. Traditional history of medicine thus ignored the patient: he or she was of no interest. Modern critical histories, by contrast, still ignore the patient but often by design; for they sometimes argue (as has David Armstrong, following Foucault) that there can be no such material person as the ‘patient’, directly accessible to the historian.