História da saúde: visível, audível e consequente

Abstract

Twenty-two years ago, in celebration of the 125th anniversary of the American Public Health Association, the historians Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown wrote an editorial for the American Journal of Public Health in which they drew attention to the ways in which history can contribute to health analyses. Historical research, they said, has the potential to enrich our evaluations of contemporary health initiatives by appraising past actions. They also observed that history can be especially useful in identifying standards, continuities, and discontinuities in the realm of ideas and initiatives in health. In conclusion, the authors wrote, "history may provide new insights into the difficulties of change, whether of social and political realities, attitudes, or behaviors" (Fee, Brown, 1997, p.1763). More recently, in mid-2014, the question of the value of the history of medicine − or history of health, as it is known in Brazilian historiography − once again came to the fore in a controversy over the contributions of this historiographic field. On the one side, writing in the comment section of the prestigious journal The Lancet, Richard Horton (2014) declared that most medical historians had abandoned any pretense of linking past problems to present ones and transforming these issues into tools for resisting the perverse changes to medicine wrought by market forces today. To his thinking, today's historians − unlike such pioneers as François Delaport, John Farley, and Roy Porter − are invisible, inaudible, and, as a result, inconsequential. The medical historian Carsten Timmermann (4 ago. 2014) was quick to reply to Horton's piece. In the blog Somatosphere, Timmermann lamented his colleague's observations, arguing that a quick look at his own book shelves was enough to disprove Horton's allegations; at one glance, Timmermann wrote, he saw works by Jeremy Greene, Ilana Lowy, Robert Aronowitz, and other scholars who draw from the past to invite their readers to think about the present, thus indicating that contemporary medical historians do not merit such a harsh judgment. While rebuffing his colleague's characterization of historians, Timmermann ended his text by encouraging medical historians to step outside their comfort zones more