SMA - in print: reports
Report on the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the History of
Medicine
http://www.histmed.org/
[note: the ms word and pdf versions of this document contain full webpage addresses (URLs).]
This note is both a report on the 2003 meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) and an invitation to further collaboration between historians of medicine and medical anthropologists. The present writer is a historian of medicine who specializes on pre-modern European women’s healthcare. I only belatedly learned about the sophisticated work being done on gender and medical anthropology, and last year I both organized an interdisciplinary colloquium on women’s health (see below) and joined the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA). I suggested to Mark Nichter that I write up a report of this year’s AAHM meeting in order to apprise medical anthropologists of the latest work is this allied field, and he responded enthusiastically to the suggestion.
AAHM Meeting. The meeting was held this year in Boston, May 1-4. Although the majority of the papers focused on western biomedicine as it has developed in Europe and North America, there was a dynamic representation of work on Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Latin America. The two plenary lectures were on DNA: one (by a physician from Yale University) explored the initially modest impact that Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA had on medical research (he dated the full impact only from the 1970s); the other was on the way DNA researches are now being used as a radically new and potent aid in reconstructing the course of past epidemics (in the case discussed, the pandemic of plague that ended the Roman world). This latter talk was especially forceful in suggesting that historians adopt the collaborative models of research that have long dominated the sciences, since research of this scale can only be done collaboratively and interdisciplinarily. In discussion, however, questions not adequately answered were how such research would be funded and how the historian could be expected to maintain her or his perspective on the contingency of history in the face of biologists’ universalism.
The titles of some particularly excellent papers can give a sense of work being done:
- Steven Palmer, “Hookworm Disease and the Popularization of Germ Theory in Early 20th-Century Latin America,” on the impact of Rockefeller Foundation campaigns to eradicate hook-worm
- Damon Salesa, “Medicine, Race and Nationalism in Samoa (1918-1936),” on indigenous heal-in traditions and resistance to “white medicine”; esp. good at showing that Samoan medicine was itself changing and porous
- Hsiu-yun Wang, “Terror and Healing: Anti-Christian Rumors and Missionary Medicine in China, 1860-1900”
- Richard Keller, “Fanon in Context: North African Physicians and the Politics of Colonial Medicine,” focused on three Tunisian physicians who preceded Fanon in his critiques of colonial medicine
- Helen Tilley, “The ‘Scramble for Africa’: Racial Science, Acclimatization, and Tropical Development, ca. 1880-1900,” on scientific theories about European acclimatization and whether tropical climates were inherently infertile; part of a bigger project on Africa as a living laboratory
The full program for the meeting is available on-line. Abstracts of the talks were given to all registrants. Those interested might wish to contact the AAHM office to see if extra copies are still available.
I am not on the AAHM’s Council and so not privy to any of the formal initiatives that the organization is planning. I can, however, discuss the initiatives of the women’s caucus. A regular feature of AAHM meetings are lunchtime workshops. The one I went to this year was “Class-room Strategies for Teaching Women and Gender in History of Medicine.” Syllabi were collected in advance and duplicated for distribution at the meeting. Five panelists spoke briefly about aspects of their own teaching experiences, readings that had proved particularly effective, etc. Anyone interested in obtaining the syllabus packet should contact Jennifer Gunn at gunnx005@tc.umn.edu.
The following day was a breakfast for the women historians. (I don’t know the background of the decision to limit this to biological women rather than scholars of whatever sex interested in gender.) We did have a guest male for the meeting, David Cantor, who is currently a research fellow at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda. He spoke to us of plans at the NLM to sponsor various new initiatives in the history of medicine (scanning documents, creating databases, sponsoring conferences). He can be contacted at cantord@mail.nih.gov.
Future meetings of the AAHM will be in Madison, Wisconsin, April 29-May 2, 2004; and in 2005 in Birmingham, Alabama. Meetings are always in late April or early May. Calls for papers usually go out in the late summer. Scholars do not have to be members of AAHM to submit a proposal, and I am not sure whether they are asked to join if their paper is accepted. (Note that the Program Committee considers all proposals individually; proposals submitted as pre-organized sessions will not necessarily all be approved nor, if accepted, will they necessarily be kept as a single panel.)
Resources for History of Medicine. The program for the AAHM meeting provides a useful snapshot of the state of the field, but for students or scholars wishing to engage more systematically with the discipline there is need for more regular dissemination of information.
Associations and Journals. The AAHM is the only national history of medicine organization in the U.S. Certain “spin-off” associations have developed from it: the Sigerist Circle, for example, is a group interested particularly in issues of class, race and gender, and/or the use Marxist, feminist and related critical methodologies in the analysis of medical history. The AAHM has an open access membership directory on its website, which is search-able only by name or state of members; you cannot, unfortunately, use it to identify individuals by their research area. AAHM does, however, publish every other year a list of work in progress; this is sent free to members and is available to others for a nominal charge. The AAHM’s official organ of publication is the Bulletin of the History of Medicine (BHM), which is based at Johns Hopkins. It is currently published in an on-line version (Project Muse), though back issues are currently available only from 1996. It is not available on JSTOR.
The other two history of medicine publications in North America are the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (JHMAS) and the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin Canadien d’histoire de la médecine. In Britain, the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine publishes Medical History, as well as the on-line, open-access Wellcome Bibliography for the History of Medicine (formerly Current work in the history of medicine). There is also a Society for Social History of Medicine, which publishes Social History of Medicine. It usually holds annual meetings in Britain, though next year (2004) it will be holding its meeting at the National Library of Medicine on the topic: History of Cancer. There are a variety of other history of medicine journals published in Europe. I know of no journal that regularly publishes both history of medicine and medical anthropology, though the latest issue of BHM (Spring 2003) includes Julie Livingston’s ethnographic study, “Pregnant Children and Half-Dead Adults: Modern Living and the Quickening Life Cycle in Botswana.”
Prizes. Although not themselves a source of information, I list various prizes here since they may be way of encouraging students, especially, to reach across disciplinary boundaries:
- AAHM sponsors two student prizes: the Osler Medal, which is awarded to a medical student in the United States or Canada "for an unpublished essay that is either the result of original research or shows unusual appreciation and understanding of historical problems." The Shryock Medal is awarded to a student enrolled in a program leading to a graduate degree in the humanities or social sciences "for an unpublished essay that is the result of original research or shows an unusual appreciation and understand-in of problems in history of medicine."
- the Society for Social History of Medicine awards The Roy Porter Student Essay Prize of £500 every year to the best student essay submitted to a competition reserved for student members of the Society.
Two other prizes given by the AAHM may be pertinent to anthropologists: The J. Worth Estes Prize, which is awarded to the authors or coauthors of an article of outstanding scholarly merit in the history of pharmacology published during the two years preceding the award; and the Jack D. Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Development Award, which is awarded in even-numbered years for a recent Ph.D. recipient working to revise his or her dissertation in the area of 20th century history of medicine or science.
Databases. There are several useful bibliographical databases in the history of medicine, though only a few of them are open access. The AAHM does not itself publish its own database, perhaps because the field has long relied on the Index Medicus and now PubMed, which includes history of medicine literature. It has been my personal experience, however, that the databases at the National Library of Medicine are quite limited in their international coverage. The Wellcome Library’s Bibliography (see above) is better in this regard, though I still find considerable gaps. The Wellcome Bibliography is now automatically synthesized into a bibliographic database by Eureka called History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. The History of Science Society (though not AAHM) includes a subscription as part of regular membership. Otherwise, your library will have to subscribe (mine does not). Another database has recently become available in France: Bulletin de Médecine Ancienne/Ancient Medicine Newsletter; and Bulletin de Médecine de Temps modernes/Early Modern Medicine Newsletter.
One aspect of history that anthropologists and other social scientists may find frustrating: like most publications in history, history of medicine publications have not normally made abstracts or keywords a regular part of the article. This is now changing (BHM, JHMAS, SHM, and Medical History have all in-corporate these features in the last few years), but this means that in searching older materials one is largely dependent on information in the titles only.
Websites. Finding websites related to history of medicine is still a hit-or-miss affair. The AAHM’s home page has only a limited listing, though these are certainly helpful for basic teaching purposes. Far more useful is the HistMed gateway sponsored by the Wellcome Library. This allows an open topic search for websites. My search under the topic “women,” for example, pulled up 27 hits, though it did not include a website I put up last year for a colloquium on “Defining Women’s Health: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue”. I mention this website precisely because it was my frustration with gaps in communication between history of medicine and medical anthropology that led me to organize the colloquium and create a website with an extensive bibliography and links to relevant organizations. It seems to me that some similar, though more large-scale, effort might serve a useful purpose.
Listservs. AAHM does not sponsor its own listserv. There is, however, a History of Science, Technology, and Medicine listserv (H-SCI-MED-TECH) that operates through H-Net. This edited listserv offers job and conference announcements and posts queries. In my experience, unless you’re on the job market, this list is more apt to clog your in-box with extraneous messages than keep you connected with history of medicine; I find only 1 in about several dozen messages has any relevance to my work. Perhaps more helpful are specialized listservs, such as Women in the History of Medicine (WHOM) <whom@artsci.wustl.edu>, contact: Conevery Bolton Valencius <cvalenci@artsci.wustl.edu>.
Because of their immediacy, listservs are the best way to keep track of upcoming conferences. Here are few that may be of interest to medical anthropologists:
13-14 June 2003, Strasbourg: "Drugs trajectories II : producing sex hormones, controlling reproduction".
1-4 July 2003, London: 72nd Anglo-American Conference of Historians, Institute for Historical Re-search, topic: “The Body”.
11-13 September 2003, Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK: “Interweaving medical traditions : Europe and Asia, 1600 - 2000” — “reassesses the relationship between eastern and western medical traditions during colonial and post-colonial times, [...] challeng[ing] the assumption that western traditions were necessarily dominant over eastern, and that eastern practitioners were excluded from the practice of state medicine.”
In lieu of subscribing to history of medicine listservs, however, you could simply bookmark “MedHist Events”, which is a new service publicizing forthcoming history of medicine conferences, workshops and seminars; events aimed at professional historians of medicine are listed separately from those aimed at a more generalist audience.
Possibilities for Further Collaboration between History and Anthropology. I have just sent in a check for $213 to renew my membership in the SMA. This is by far (more than double) the amount I pay for any of my other memberships in professional academic organizations, which already totaled nearly $400 year. (AAHM’s annual fee, by the way, is $70 [$20 for students]; the Society for Social History of Medicine’s is £33.00/US$56 [students and members from developing countries, £16/US$36]; the Sigerist Circle’s a bargain-basement $15.00, though there is no journal.) Besides underscoring the obvious fact that interdisciplinarity is expensive, these financial considerations raise the question of what might be the most profitable way to encourage dialogue across disciplines. Is the occasional random “boundary-crosser” such as myself sufficient? Would official delegates exchanged between AAHM and SMA (with membership fees waived) be a possibility? (Such a provision is already allowed in the AAHM’s by-laws.) One model might be co-ordinate conferences (e.g., meeting at the same conference site every third year, as is done with the History of Science society and some of its sister organizations), though this might be impractical given that SMA meets with the AAA. Since there are only a handful of academic programs that regularly juxtapose historians of medicine with medical anthropologists (Social Medicine at Harvard, McGill, and the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at UCSF), there does not seem any obvious trajectory by which history of medicine and medical anthropology will inter-sect or interact on their own.
Certainly fundamental to any future collaboration between history of medicine and medical anthropology needs to be a shared sense that we have something to offer one another. History of medicine is almost unrecognizable today when compared to the often amateurish and Whiggish work that characterized most of the field two generations ago. Text-based analysis still dominates medical history, just as ethnography dominates medical anthropology. Yet the “linguistic turn”—an understanding of the ways discourses are structured and in turn shape power relations—has had a broad effect in the humanities and social sciences, and in that respect it seems that the kinds of questions historians and anthropologists need to ask about health, disease, and healing are largely the same. Historians regularly look at the whole “medical marketplace” now instead of just the top tier of elite physicians. The patient’s perspective is now part of the narrative, and not necessarily as a weak or voiceless victim of medical power but as an active agent in shaping the contours of medical practice. Obviously, many medical anthropologists have urgent concerns due to the policy implications of their research, a situation rarely faced by the historian (though debates about the role of historians as “expert witnesses” in class-action suits dealing with lead poisoning and Big Tobacco generated a lot of heat at this year’s meeting!). While the interests of historians who do recent history and anthropologists who are doing field work in the contemporary world seem most obviously allied, the common search for patterns and structures in society as they relate to health and disease is, in fact, a concern that unites us all.
Respectfully submitted,
Monica H. Green
Professor of History
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-2501
e-mail: Monica.Green@asu.edu