Beth Linker

The study of the history of medicine began as a practice of teaching and writing about individuals. In the first history of medicine courses taught in American universities during the late nineteenth century, instructors told stories of "great doctors," mapping out a straight line of historical advancement.

Things are very different today. The change began in the 1970s with the arrival of the "new" social history. At that time, a cohort of professionally trained non-physician historians of medicine rejected the authority of "great doctors" and their ideas, reacting to the biographically oriented beginnings of the history of medicine with disdain. To this day, social historians of medicine throughout the English-speaking world continue to employ a rhetoric of patricide, distinguishing their "new" (albeit now almost thirty-year-old) context-driven method of writing history from individual-centered "traditional" medical history, a method manifested in biographies written for, about, and often by physicians.

Yet there is an important exception to the widespread hostility among American social historians of medicine to great figures in history. As part of their effort to purge the field of "elitist" approaches of historical study that focus on individuals, social historians of medicine have come perilously close to producing a hagiographical portrait of one particular individual: Henry E. Sigerist, a Swiss physician and professionally trained historian who is today widely regarded as one of the most important figures in beginning the turn toward a more "sociological" approach to medical history.

What is most striking about the appropriation of Sigerist as a founding father to the "new" history is not the apparent contradiction involved in looking up to one great physician-historian as the inspiration for a method that refuses to admire great doctors. Most striking is the fact that social historians have made Sigerist the leader of an ideological-methodological crusade in which he would have been, at best, a reluctant participant. A close examination of Sigerist’s work shows us that, compared to the "new" social history, Sigerist’s "older" approach to social history allowed for methodological pluralism that, despite what his inheritors have proclaimed, included medical biography.