Frontmatter and Editorial

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the frontmatter and editorial: 

As recent as half a century ago, the history of medicine was primarily a field preoccupied with the development of medical ideas about diseases and treatments and how they changed over time. After the rise and intervention of the "new" social history, the field has now expanded to being more attentive to the voice of the patient, a methodological turn advocated by such historians of medicine as Roy Porter. Writing women back into the grand historical narrative of medicine can certainly be viewed as one of the decisive consequences of this historiographical transformation since the 1960s. However, as the scholarship of Thomas Laqueur (Making Sex, 1990) and Charlotte Furth (A Flourishing Yin, 1999) has made clear, to make issues of gender and the body more pertinent to the history of medicine oftentimes requires a complete re-evaluation of the analytic category of gender itself. In other words, the revisionist task should not stop at the level of making sure more "voices" are heard. Whether we treat the rise of the two-sex model in Enlightenment Europe or the emergence of gynecology in Song China as a paradigmatic turning point in the history of medicine, the methodological turn to "culture," broadly defined, from social history should inspire us not only to improve grand narratives on a more empirically-inclusive ground, though this should rightfully be a priority, but also to reassess the assumptions embedded within the framing of any narrative from the very outset.