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Biomedicine and Its Historiography: A Systematic Review

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Book cover Handbook of the Historiography of Biology

Part of the book series: Historiography of Science ((HISTSC,volume 1))

Abstract

In this essay I conduct a quantitative systematic review of the scholarly literature in history of life sciences, assessing how well the distribution of the activity of historians aligns with the distribution of activities of scientists across fields of biomedical research as defined by expenditures by the cognate institutes of the United States NIH. I also ask how well the distribution of resources to the various research fields of biomedicine in the second half of the 20th Century has aligned with morbidity and mortality in the United States associated with the cognate disease categories. The two exercises point to underexplored areas for historical work, and open new historical questions about research policy in the US.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    US public and private combined biomedical research spending still accounted for half of world spending in the mid-2000s (Moses et al. 2015). I am not aware of reliable figures earlier than this, but given the postwar state of European and Asian economies until the 1980s, it would be safe to suppose that before the 1990s the United States would have accounted for far more than half.

  2. 2.

    http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/, accessed 2 July 2015. I have not counted how many Physiology or Medicine Laureates have higher medical, dental, or veterinary degrees, but the proportion is very substantial [why not count and give stat to us?]. Another interesting question is whether that proportion has changed over time.

  3. 3.

    Second Deficiency Appropriations Bill, Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, US Senate (80th Cong., 2nd sess.), on H. R. 6935 (Washington: GPO, 1948), 17 June 1948, p. 141 (testimony of Oscar Ewing and Leonard Scheele), pp. 141–143 (statement of Senator Claude Pepper).

  4. 4.

    Data available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/series/00197

  5. 5.

    The other search term clusters were as follows: Mental Health, Research AND Psychiatry OR Behaviour OR Behaviour OR Mental Health OR Psychopharmacology OR Insanity; Kidney and Metabolic Disease, Research AND Diabetes OR Kidney OR Metabolic OR Gastrointestinal OR Arthritis; Infectious Disease, Research AND Immunology OR Bacteriology OR Virology OR Parasitology OR Allergy; Neurology, Research AND Neurology OR Brain OR Stroke OR Spinal OR Cerebral; Childhood Disease, Research AND Childhood OR Neonatal OR Pediatric OR Pediatric OR Congenital OR Embryology.

  6. 6.

    Forrest Linder and Robert Grove, Vital Statistics Rates in the United States, 1900–1940 (Federal Security Agency; GPO 1947), available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/vsrates1900_40.pdf; accessed 2 July 2015); Mortality Tables: Table 12.

  7. 7.

    It might be supposed that historians have mostly attended to the early twentieth-century golden age of bacteriology, when it achieved its most dramatic successes. However, it seems this is not the case: the majority (38/74) of elite journal articles returned by the searches in the review dealt substantially with events after 1945. My takeaway impression is that the center of gravity of the retrieved literature in this area lies in the 1930s and is motivated by questions about how postwar biomedicine took the shape it did.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Nicolas Rasmussen

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  1. Nicolas Rasmussen
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Correspondence to Nicolas Rasmussen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. HPS Dept, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh HPS Dept, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    Michael Dietrich

  2. University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA

    Mark Borrello

  3. Tel Aviv, Israel

    Oren Harman

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Rasmussen, N. (2018). Biomedicine and Its Historiography: A Systematic Review. In: Dietrich, M., Borrello, M., Harman, O. (eds) Handbook of the Historiography of Biology. Historiography of Science, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74456-8_12-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74456-8_12-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74456-8

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