Who is best qualified to study the history of medicine? Physicians with technical training? Historians with a finer appreciation of how to approach the past? This issue has mostly been resolved in the West, where historians have largely replaced physicians, fulfilling the call of Henry Sigerist in the 1940s to move from the “Great Man in medicine” narrative to a more social and cultural approach. In Europe and the Americas, the history of medicine has emerged as an acknowledged field within history. Just consider the annual conference of the American Association for the History of Medicine, where historians rather than doctors now dominate the program. A quick browse through the contents of the association's official journal, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, confirms that most of the work is being done by scholars who belong to university history departments.
