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About 2 years ago, I sat down at a seminar table at a medical school in Taiwan to give an informal talk for faculty and students about experiences at my own university in teaching the history of medicine in a medical centre. 1 I had not provided a title because this was to be a casual conversation, so I panicked when I saw on the table in front of me a flyer publicising the event with the English title: "Teaching Humanity in Medicine". "But I don't do that!" I said in an apologetic whisper to my host, who quickly reassured me that it was just an artefact of translation and that it was in fact 'medical humanities' the group expected me to address. My nervous reaction to the title, though, as I realised on later reflection, arose from a deeper anxiety I have frequently experienced when confronted by the often unspoken expectation of medical colleagues that I and other historians of medicine somehow must assume that by teaching medical history we will 'humanise' medical students-that we will teach humanity in medicine.
My focus here is on this idea that history can and ought to serve modern medicine as a humanising force. Let me say clearly at the outset that most American historians of medicine today (and I include myself) would be very hesitant about any claim that medical history humanises doctors, medical students or the larger healthcare enterprise. As an historian, therefore, I find it particularly striking that the proposition that history should be a cornerstone of humanistic medicine first emerged at precisely the moment when modern Western biomedicine became ascendant; and that some iteration of this vision of history as a humanising force has been remarkably durable. I want to recount the inception of this idea, focusing narrowly on the USA, then to lightly sketch its longer trajectory across the 20th century. The idea of history as a humanising force has almost always functioned as a discourse of deficiency. There have been anti-science currents as well, but that is outside my focus here. Instead, I want to look at this idea as a revealing index of the changing ways in which biomedicine-while celebrated for its technical power-has been seen as insufficient for making good...