Medicine in the field: Growing connections between environmental and medical history

Abstract

This article argues that Environmental History and History of Medicine are disciplines that are natural allies and productive partners; successfully working across the sub-disciplines will be essential to understanding current and future crises, including climate change and pandemics. While it is relatively easy to find acknowledged intersections between histories of science and/or technology and of the environment, so far these are less systematic and substantial in the history of medicine. Partly this is because there are points of serious methodological and theoretical tension, but I argue that these can function as moments of contact and provocation. Most obviously Environmental History poses challenges to historians of medicine in terms of the scale of our work in both its chronological and conceptual reach, and how we incorporate the non-human, and even the non-biotic as historical actors. History of Medicine offers approaches to help environmental historians negotiate their relationships with science, in particular the balance between science as a subject of study or as a source of data. Both disciplines share the struggle of combining focused, heavily contextualised local histories with the pressing need for globalised and ‘big picture’ historical explanations. In this review I will outline the main historiographical challenges to working across these subdisciplines—particularly in terms of scale and focus—and then consider the most productive intersections of these fields before making recommendations for future collaborative work.