The medical historian at work

Abstract

Medical history is the record of how our present know ledge of medicine and surgery has been acquired through the ages and of how this knowledge has been applied to the prevention, control and treatment of disease. The task of the medical historian, therefore, is: (a) to discover and record ideas and events in the march of medicine and place them in the context of the social, economic and religious currents of their time as the study of medical history cannot be pursued in isolation from the study of other fields of human behaviour; (b) to show how the past is linked with the present in a continuous line of progression; how the present is built on the past and how the future is shaped by the present; and (c) to find om the reasons behind the failures of the past and thus help his contemporaries to move forwards into the future more efficiently and with the minimum of hazards.