The issues constituting the history of medicine are consequential: how societies organize health care, how individuals or states relate to sickness, how we understand our own identity and agency as sufferers or healers. In Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, Frank Huisman, John Harley Warner, and other eminent historians explore and reflect on a field that accommodates a remarkable diversity of practitioners and approaches.

At a time when medical history is facing profound choices about its future, these scholars explore the discipline in the distant and recent past in order to rethink its missions and methods today. They discuss such issues as the periodic estrangement of medical history from medicine, the influence of Foucault on the writing of medical history, and the shifts from social to cultural history and back again. Chapters explore the early history of the field, its transformations since the 1970s, and its prospects for the future.

With diverse constituencies, a multiplicity of approaches, styles, and aims is both expected and desired. This volume locates medical history within itself and within larger historiographic trends, to provide a springboard for discussions about what the history of medicine should be, and what aims it should serve.

Contributors: Olga Amsterdamska, University of Amsterdam; Warwick Anderson, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Allan M. Brandt, Harvard Medical School; Theodore M. Brown, University of Rochester; Roger Cooter, University College London; Martin Dinges, Institut für Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung; Alice Domurat Dreger, Michigan State University; Jacalyn Duffin, Queen's University; Elizabeth Fee, National Library of Medicine; Mary E. Fissell, The Johns Hopkins University; Danielle Gourevitch, École Pratique des Hautes Études; Anja Hiddinga, University of Amsterdam; Ludmilla Jordanova, University of East Anglia; Alfons Labisch, Heinrich-Heine-University; Hans-Uwe Lammel, University of Rostock; Sherwin B. Nuland, Yale University; Vivian Nutton, University College London; Roy Porter, formerly University College London; Susan M. Reverby. Wellesley College; David Rosner, Columbia University; Thomas Rütten, University of Newcastle upon Tyne; Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach, University of Greifswald; Christiane Sinding, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale

Frank Huisman is a professor in the history of medicine at the University Medical Center Utrecht and Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He also teaches in the Department of History at Maastricht University. He is the author of Stadsbelang en standsbesef and co-editor of Medische geschiedenis in regionaal perspectief. John Harley Warner is Avalon Professor and Chair of the History of Medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine and a professor of history and of American studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Therapeutic Perspective and Against the Spirit of System.