Aileen Fyfe asks whether the recent dominance of [recent] history
of medicine in the UK is due to funding there, and also whether it is a
good thing.  While the Welcome Trust has certainly played a role in
establishing history of medicine in the UK--wish we had one here in
the states--I don't think the phenomenon is unique to the UK.  Public
interest in medical questions has historically as well as currently
been higher in things medical and biological: when Vannevar Bush wrote
the Endless Frontier, he talked as much about penicillin as about radar
(even though in private he had a low opinion of medicine and medical
science).  But turf aside, there's another issue to discuss here: where
are the intellectual opportunities for historians of medicine and
historians of science/technology to talk productively with one another?
On H-SCI-MED-TECH we ran a discussion last February of Peter Galison's
Image and Logic; it was striking to me how few non-physicists were willing
to read the book, much less participate in the discussion.  

	Border crossing is much easier for the early modern period than
for current history, where history of smt seems to follow the ruts carved
out by the science disciplines themselves.  I'm trying to think of a c. 20
analogue to Adrien Desmond's wonderful exploration of the cross-cutting
terrain between medical anatomy and evolutionary biology [sic] in c. 19
Britain. I can't.  As someone who still steals some of his best
inspirations from early modernists, I wonder if the key issue is not
dominance of hist med or of recent history, but the parochial character of
our reading, training and thinking.  Even in general history, true
comparativists are rare birds; historians of the US are blithfully
ignorant of non US history; and modernists rarely read and less rarely
think about the problems of earlier histories.  What's the cure? I
don't know, but I don't think simply pumping up the volume of research
specialists from early modern will do the job.
Harry M. Marks
Dept. History of Science, Medicine
   & Technology
Johns Hopkins University
1900 E. Monument Street
Baltimore, MD 21205
410-955-4899



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