Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine

A noted medical historian explores the roles played by various intellectual frameworks and trends in the writing of history A collection of ten essays paired with substantial prefaces, this book chronicles and contextualizes Roger Cooters contributions to the history of medicine. Through an analysis of his own work, Cooter critically examines the politics of conceptual and methodological shifts in historiography. In particular, he examines the double bind of postmodernism and biological or neurological modeling that, together, threaten academic history. To counteract this trend, suggests Cooter, historians must begin actively locating themselves in the problems they consider. The essays and commentaries constitute a kind of contour map of historys recent trends and trajectoriesits points of passage to the presentand lead both to a critical account of the disciplines historiography and to an examination of the role of intellectual frameworks and epistemic virtues in the writing of history.