The Humanizing Power of Medical History: Responses to Biomedicine in the 20th-Century United States

From the end of the 19th century through the present, the idea that medical history can and ought to serve modern medicine as a humanizing force has been a persistent refrain in American medicine. Focusing on the United States, this paper explores the emergence of this idea at precisely the moment when modern Western biomedicine became ascendant. At the same institutions where the new version of scientific medicine was most energetically embraced, some professional leaders began to warn that the same allegiance to science driving the professional technical and cultural success was also endangering humanistic values that were fundamental to professionalism, the art of medicine, and cultural cohesion. They saw in history a means for re-humanizing modern medicine and countering the risk of cultural crisis. The meanings attached to medical “humanism” have been changing and multiple, but, as this paper shows, some iteration of this vision of history as a humanizing force was remarkably durable across the 20th century. It was especially revitalized in the 1970s as part of a larger cultural critique of the putative “de- humanization” of the medical establishment, when some advocates promoted medical history as tool for fashioning a new kind of humanist physician and a source of guidance in confronting social inequities of the health care system. What has persisted across time is the way that the idea of history as a humanizing force has almost always function as a discourse of deficiency—a response to perceived shortcomings of biomedicine, medical institutions, and medical professionalism.