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The
Harvard Program in the History of Medicine is an interfaculty program
jointly sponsored by the Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Faculty
of Arts and Sciences (FAS). At Harvard Medical School, teaching and
research is based in the Department of Social Medicine. At FAS, the
program is based in the Department of the History of Science, a department
offering undergraduate and graduate programs leading to the Ph.D.
The Program is strongly committed to teaching and research that places
the development of medical knowledge and practice into broad social
and cultural contexts. In recent years, the field of the history of
medicine has undergone an important transformation. Although study of
the development of scientific and medical knowledge remains crucial
to the field, studies have increasingly attempted to assess the changing
nature of scientific and medical practices, the experiences of health
and illness, as well as the history of health policies. These interests
are strongly reflected in the research and teaching aspects of the Program.
At the core of the Program's agenda are studies of how medicine and
science evolve from--and are reincorporated into--a wider social and
cultural context; how health care inevitably leads to complex moral,
ethical, and policy issues; and how the determinants of health and disease
are revealed through investigations into the social and scientific responses
to both epidemic and chronic disease. A principal tenet of the approach
fostered in the Program is that historical scholarship may assist in
a more sophisticated understanding of a wide array of questions and
dilemmas in contemporary medicine and science
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