Put out your tongue! The role of clinical insight in the study of the history of medicine.

摘要

Historians of medicine are often gloomily familiar with clinicians' incursions into their intellectual arena. We physicians offer hagiographic biographies of obscure nineteenth-century medical figures, triumphalist narratives of medical progress and - the most heinous offence - retrospective diagnosis of ailments afflicting historical characters. But clinicians have also offered some excellent insights to the discipline. As a medical practitioner, I intend to argue that clinical insight can be valuable; not in providing answers -here, clinicians' contemporary interpretations of disease and its treatment can lead us to become unstuck - but in raising questions which might not occur to historians.