Plurality and ¿anxiety?: the history of medicine today

Abstract

This essay reflects on the tensions generated around historical studies on health and disease. Such tensions have various edges, and many are comparable to those addressed by the History of Science. The perception of the risk of fragmentation and loss of professional identity is important, but it does not seem that the solution is to return to the grand narratives. Another tension arises from the apparent distance between the sophistication of the research and the need to address diverse audiences, including students and health professionals. Some processes related to how research activity is developed and measured are clearly proving to be harmful to historical research. The alternative that is proposed is to escape from the prescriptive analysis of what the History of Medicine is or should be and try, on a daily basis, to apply a rigorous approach to what it meant in the past to get sick, alleviate diseases, heal and die, which is open to new ways of seeing and analyzing, but without pursuing the latest historiographic turn.