Medical Historians Take Over the Concept: The Late Twentieth Century

As I have suggested, it would have been difficult for anyone observing the deprofessionalization of physicians and changes in scholarly work to have foreseen that, from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, the history of the profession of medicine would have thrived, indeed, blossomed. With sociology turned elsewhere, with new and different emphases in social history and in the world of intellect in general, that the idea of profession should flourish within medical history comes as a surprise. But in fact the historians of medicine took "profession" and pushed the subject further-indeed, made it their own. And the main writers who did this came from what John Harley Warner describes as a recognizable "generation of historical scholarship" in the history of medicine.1 Moreover, the history of medicine was no longer an isolated subject. In this context, the history of the medical profession acquired additional dimensions as scholars added new ways of viewing ideas such as expertise and community and as more and more investigators wrote about the history of all professions-including medicine. As early as 1982-1983, several eyewitnesses commented on the new activity in the history of professions. Matthew Ramsey (1948-), a historian of medicine with a keen interest in the history of all professions, labelled the history of professions a "vogue" within the discipline of history. One sign that he cited was a special programme led by Lawrence Stone (1912-) at Princeton University in the United States, a programme later commemorated by two volumes edited by Gerald Geison (1943_).2 Another was a special issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft on 'Professionalization in Historical Perspective'.3 Such investigations into the history of professions, Ramsey observed, already were showing that further empirical studies could advance a number of scholarly dialogues in which the idea of profession was involved: Marxist versus non-Marxist interpretations of professionals' functioning; science versus the market as the determining factor in the history of expertise; bureaucratic imperatives; and social hierarchy as a fundamental force in human activity.4