The latest International Journal of Epidemiology features a wonderful set of articles for the medical humanist in its "Reprints and Reflections" section. Specifically, the journal reprints Erwin Ackerknecht's seminal 1948 article published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, entitled "Anticontagionism Between 1821 and 1867." Ackerknecht was Charles E. Rosenberg's dissertation advisor, and is properly considered as one of the founding figures in the professional history of medicine in the U.S.
(Rosenberg recently wrote a lively and informative background article on Ackerknecht and the concept of social medicine, including some biographical notes from Rosenberg's experience with him).
(Earlier notions of the history of medicine tended to shade towards a heroic notion of medical progress, often but not exclusively carried on by physicians with an interest in history. There is, of course, nothing remotely wrong with physicians interested in medical history, but this, I want to suggest, is something generally different from professional historical practice centered on medicine and illness. In the Rosenberg article cited above, he notes that Ackerknecht derisively referred to practitioners of this older version of the history of medicine as "medico-history sunday drivers").
The journal then adds commentaries from four of the more important historians of medicine in the U.S: Rosenberg, Christopher Hamlin, Alexandra Minna Stern, and Howard Markel (who recently became the first historian elected into the Institute of Medicine). I have not had the chance to read all of the commentaries yet, but I am well-acquainted with these scholars' work, and I cannot recommend that work highly enough.
More specifically, Ackerknecht's essay is one of the central works that framed thinking and understanding of disease causality in the nineteenth century, a subject that Rosenberg and Hamlin in particular have keyed on. Disease causality is a subject we have touched on here, and may touch on again soon, and it remains a nice example of a pathway in which historical conceptions, attitudes, and practices continue to shape contemporary views.
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