"Medicine has always had its s, but until recently it was a history written by and for practitioners. Until the early nineteenth century, in fact, history and practice could hardly be distinguished. Galen and Hippocrates could be and were used to bolster arguments about the nature of fever or the logic of a particular therapeutic choice. A learned physician read Latin and , not simply to mystify the laity but to work with those master texts that still figured meaningfully in his intellectual life. By the late nineteenth century, of course, the writings of and were no longer alive in the thought and practice of even educated practitioners. History had become quite clearly history — something in the past. This is not to suggest that interest in the medicine of previous eras disappeared. It remained was to become gradually — if even today incompletely — an academic field. But the history of medicine was still populated almost entirely by scholars trained in medical schools, the great majority of whom made their living as physicians."
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Academics from the United StatesHistorians from the United StatesColumbia University alumniHarvard University facultyHistorians of science
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Charles E. Rosenberg
(born November 11, 1936) is an American historian of medicine and medical science. He was the 1982 Fielding H. Garrison Lecturer for the and the 1988 Benjamin Rush Lecturer for the . He received in 1969 the and in 1997 the . In 2002 he was elected a Member of the .
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