History of Medicine
La femme médecin, s.d., Draeger Imp.., Paris. Collection BIU Santé Médecine.
The teaching of History of Medicine aims to account for the incessant back and forth between past and present, between advanced historical research and critical attention to the contemporary, because this discipline has the ambition to be a laboratory for reflection on man, the body, the actors, the relationships and the institutions of contemporary medicine based on knowledge of the past. Thus, in our courses, we wish to stimulate learning essentially driven by:
- knowledge, achievements and discourses in medicine (but not only, of course) are the product of a specific and delimited context of action and thought;
- knowledge, from the past like that of today, is necessarily transitory and mutable (relativism).
- A critical mind is mandatory in order to detect and identify the multiple stakes, divergent interests, constraints and strategies involved, in short the complexity immanent to all medical phenomena when it comes to understanding and interpreting them also in their social, cultural and political dimensions.