Popular medical history often discusses the rise of ‘modern medicine’ in the 19th or 20th century. Critical medical history problematizes the idea. In his forthcoming academic book
The New Modern Medicine: Disease, Evidence, and Epidemiological Medicine (OUP, 2025), Jonathan Fuller revives the idea of modern medicine as a legitimate historical and philosophical problem. This author-meets-critics roundtable will discuss the book’s argument and themes raised by it.
The New Modern Medicine argues that scientific medicine made medicine modern. But scientific medicine needs further theorizing. It was once associated with the rise of the experimental laboratory, but this narrow rendering misses the point that scientific medicine is shifting and continues to serve as ground on which new battles for scientific authority are fought, though typically under different terms. Scholarly reflection on the characteristics of scientific medicine can help counteract or at least clarify cultural narratives such as evidence-based medicine and personalized medicine.
The New Modern Medicine argues that the new modern scientific medicine since the second world war is epidemiological: many of the concepts and methods of epidemiology became the concepts and methods of clinical medicine. ‘Epidemiological medicine’ weaves together several threads in medical historiography, including contemporary multifactorial conceptions of disease etiology, and the pervasiveness of epidemiological risk in medicine. However, we should also question whether medicine is becoming postmodern, less dominated by the hegemony of mainstream scientific orthodoxy. This roundtable includes historians who have explored some of these themes, especially modern epidemiology and its relationship to medicine. The session will proceed as follows. In speaking slots of approximately 10 min each, the author will summarize the book’s argument, before each of three discussants offers commentary. Then the author will respond before the roundtable discussion enlarges to include the audience for approximately 40 min.
Chair email:
[email protected] Learning Outcomes- Develop the capacity for critical thinking about the nature, ends and limits of medicine
- Promote tolerance for ambiguity of theories, the nature of evidence, and the evaluation of appropriate patient care, research, and education
- Understand the dynamic history of medical ideas and practices, their implications for patients and health care providers, and the need for lifelong learning
