The Fear of (One's Own) History. On the Relations Between Medical Anthropology, Medicine and History

Abstract

Even though for most of medical anthropologists, history of medicine is far from their professional interest, that is not the case in South European and specially in Latin American medical anthropology. For us, history of medicine is a seminal point of academic discussion in the last two decades particularly in those anthropologists who work on the processes of health/disease/care linked to medicalization. Among others interesting consequences, common areas of interest develop. This article aims to explore a main obstacle to the full conquest of interdisciplinarity, namely the persistence of subaltern discourses and practices related to medical history and to social sciences among the medical professions, which at the same time becomes also an artifact that led social scientists to misunderstand the image of medical history in medical practice.