Waller John
Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, USA.
J Invest Surg. 2008 Mar-Apr;21(2):53-6. doi: 10.1080/08941930801986459.
What is the point of teaching the history of medicine? Many historians and clinicians find it regrettable that some medical students today will graduate knowing almost nothing of such "greats" of the past as Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Harvey, Lister, and Pasteur. But does this really matter? After all, traditional history of medicine curricula tended to distort medicine's past, omitting the countless errors, wrong turns, fads, blunders, and abuses, in order to tell the sanitized stories of a few scientific superheroes. Modern scholarship has seriously challenged most of these heroic dramas; few of our heroes were as farsighted, noble, or obviously correct as once thought. Joseph Lister, for example, turns out to have had filthy wards, whereas William Harvey was devoted to the Aristotelianism he was long said to have overthrown [1]. But as the history of medicine has become less romanticized, it has also become much more relevant, for it promises to impart useful lessons in the vital importance of scientific scepticism.
讲授医学史的意义何在？许多历史学家和临床医生感到遗憾的是，如今一些医学生毕业时对希波克拉底、盖伦、维萨里、哈维、李斯特和巴斯德等过去的“伟人”几乎一无所知。但这真的重要吗？毕竟，传统的医学史课程往往会歪曲医学的过去，省略无数的错误、弯路、时尚、失误和滥用，只为讲述少数科学超级英雄净化后的故事。现代学术研究对这些英雄事迹大多提出了严峻挑战；我们的英雄中很少有人像曾经认为的那样有远见、高尚或明显正确。例如，事实证明约瑟夫·李斯特的病房很脏，而长期以来人们一直认为威廉·哈维推翻了亚里士多德主义，但他实际上却笃信亚里士多德主义[1]。但随着医学史不再那么浪漫化，它也变得更加切题，因为它有望传授有关科学怀疑主义至关重要性的实用经验教训。
