Abstract
Tom Treasure raised an important question, 1 as to whether doctors should leave the history of medicine to historians. Unfortunately, his paper focussed more on his own history research than on answering the question posed in the title.
Doctors can make good historians, but they need some training to acquire knowledge of historical methods and to develop the requisite skills. In particular, without training, doctors often fall into the pitfall of attempting to investigate and write history by using clinical methods rather than historical methods. In a clinical history, doctors look retrospectively at a chronology of antecedents to understand what is going on in the present. They take a ‘scientific’, reductionist approach and try to draw a single conclusion, the diagnosis, with pointers to future management. This is a far cry from standard historical methodology. A historian attempts to ‘time travel’ back to the past and understand the past through the eyes of those who were there and to explain the complexities of past happenings in their broader context. Only then might a historian dare to draw inferences from it about learning for the present, and this is likely to be discursive rather than reductionist. The goals and methodologies of clinical histories and historical histories are not interchangeable.
The paper recounts an apocryphal tale of a surgeon telling his academic historian friend that he’d taken up medical history in retirement. ‘Good for you,’ the historian replied, ‘Now that I am off the academic treadmill, I think I’ll do a bit of brain surgery.’ In both medicine and history, it is not just a matter of doing, but learning and training in order to do properly and produce excellent, credible and creditable outcomes. I hope the anecdotal medical historian went to medical school to train to become a brain surgeon, and that the anecdotal doctor did a Master’s in history, at least, and preferably a PhD.