Why should intellectual historians care about the history of medicine? As someone who admires and draws frequently on intellectual history but is mostly an outsider to the field, I asked myself this question after accepting the invitation to review two books related to medical history for Modern Intellectual History. To make the question manageable, I decided to investigate how much the history of medicine had cropped up in the pages of MIH since it began publishing in 2004. Three terms fundamental to the history of medicine went into the MIH search engine: “medicine,” “physician,” and “disease.” “Medicine” yielded seven hits, “physician” three, and “disease” one. Curious to see in what context “medicine” appeared, I clicked on the seven hits and discovered three book reviews, two articles that made mention of medicine only incidentally, and two articles that connected medicine to the history of subjectivity. Because seven hits seemed low and the subjectivity result intrigued me, I went back to the search engine with a more specific set of terms. “Psychology” yielded sixteen hits, “psychoanalysis” fourteen, and “psychiatry” one. These results, of course, only tell us about the publishing record of MIH and not necessarily about the research interests that intellectual historians might have in the history of medicine. Still, they do suggest that the piece of medical history most useful to intellectual historians concerns the mind/brain sciences—that is, those sciences most likely to engage minds, selves, identities, the individual, and related constructs of interiority. Apparently less interesting is work from other vibrant research areas in medical history: diseases (e.g. cholera, cancer, plague), hospitals, medical education, medical practice, medical technology, medical sciences (e.g. physiology, nutrition, biochemistry), and the body, to name just a few. Intellectual historians, it seems, hold a strong but quite selective interest in medicine right now.
Anthony J. La Vopa. The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures. Intellectual History of the Modern Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 360. $79.95 (cloth).