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date: 20 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This article explores what both historians of medicine and historians of science could gain from a stronger entanglement of their respective research agendas. It first gives a cursory outline of the history of the relationship between science and medicine since the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. Medicine can very well be seen as a domain that was highly productive of scientific knowledge, yet in ways that do not fit very well with the historiographic framework that dominated the history of science. Furthermore, the article discusses two alternative historiographical approaches that offer ways of thinking about the growth of knowledge that fit well with the cumulative and translational patterns that characterize the development of the medical sciences, and also provide an understanding of concepts such as ‘health’ and ‘life’.

Keywords: medicine, science, historiographic, health, life

Staffan Müller-Wille

Staffan Müller-Wille is Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter and associated with the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society and the Centre for Medical History. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Bielefeld (Germany) and has previously worked for the German Hygiene Museum, Dresden, and the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. He has published extensively on the history of heredity and genetics. Among his most recent publications is a book in German, Vererbung. Geschichte und Kultur eines biologischen Konzepts, which is currently being translated into English for University of Chicago Press.

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