The difficulty about setting works in motion to define the fundamentals of a discipline like History of Medicine (this is, which are the theories, methodological proceedings, models and tendencies, views and present problems useful to understand this field of work) is a consequence of the social and intellectual atmosphere of the change of century. With these premises, professor of the department of Pathological Anatomy and Science History of the UGR, Rosa María Medina Doménech, deals with the work “The history of Medicine in the 21st century. A postcolonial view”, published by the Universidad de Granada Press.
The book has been structured in two parts. In the first one, “The History of Medicine at the dawn of the 21st century”, the author draws n historiographical landscape which intends to show some of the concerns of contemporaneous human sciences, besides clarifying and laying down the foundations which inspire the proposals for teaching the History of Medicine developed in the second section of the book.
“Structured in six points, besides the introduction –professor Medina says–, in this part I have dealt with generic questions such as the connections between theory and history, the review of some historical categories of analysis or the question of the complexity of historical explanation. Other aspects are focused on specific questions, particularly those concerning our discipline. I will tackle here the role of medical assistance, the review of the idea of science or the new fields of interest incorporated to the historical and medical agenda, such as the approaches to the new medical technologies and, particularly, of these with regard to the configuration of collective or individual identities”.
In the second part, “Decentring the History of Medicine as a teaching project”, after drawing the historiographical fundamentals, Medina Doménech deals with certain proposals for a teaching program. The first section shows the institutional framework and the programmatic aims of the discipline, reporting some evidences that show the perception of teaching by the students of the Faculty of Medicine of Granada.
The author also presents “some of the teaching proceedings I have been using in my teaching practice. Given the enormous spread of what we could call «our discipline» –those contributions of historical nature focused on the study of questions connected with health and disease–, the mission of preparing a synthesis that includes a reasonable discussion of tendencies and objects of analysis becomes a titanic task nowadays”.
Reviewing the idea of science
The text also deals with medical assistance and reviews the own idea of science and medical technologies as well as certain suggestions for a teaching program. According to professor Medina, “a substantial number of teaching projects, unfortunately unpublished, have dealt, with profundity and rigor, the framework of our field of work. These projects have defined in the last years a not only reasonably comprehensive framework, but very fruitful too, including from the history of ideas to social history with more or less extensive incursions, according to the case, in the new routes of cultural history, speech studies or its productive relationship with anthropology. In my opinion, a similar attempt would not have contributed anything new to the excellence of the many works carried out, some of which have provided an essential basis for this proposal”.
Reference
Professor Rosa María Medina Doménech
Department of Pathological Anatomy and Science History
Phone number. 958 248 297 / 958 248 357. E-mail. rosam@ugr.es
