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Each is only a partial account of evidence from the past and is therefore a dangerous basisįor action in the present. Some readers, even some historians, who read these statements quickly may wonder what is wrong with them. Medical progress for more than a century has made plain the fundamental biological origins of disease. There is a long historical record of public health workers protecting the confidentiality of the people they screen and test.Īuthority has always prevailed over liberty during periods of social terror about infectious disease. Here are a few problematic statements that have been made many times:īasic research should receive more funds because in the past this has been the path to discovering the causes and cures for diseases. Lack of serious attention to historical analysis leads to quick and crude generalizations. Sometimes the generalizations are derived from a hurried reading of a few books or articles or from several telephone calls to historians.Įxamples of this superficial use of history have been plentiful during the AIDS epidemic. This history is usually drawn from institutional memory (a euphemism for long-time employees) often it is oral tradition-particularly in the professions. Generalizations about history abound in learned journals and in the press and public documents. Most people have continued to behave as if interpretations of the past are important to them. The diminished status of historical methods of analysis has not, of course, meant that history has disappeared from public discourse. These causes include changes in priorities at all levels of education, a widely shared assumption in our culture that all problems will ultimately be solved by 'hard' (quantitative, experimental) research, and, not least, a loss of interest in the relevance of their work among many scholars who use historical methods.

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Historians, increasingly, have been writing for other historians, with little hope that they can help inform or shape the directions of public policy.Ī full discussion of the complicated causes of the decline of history as a basic discipline of public policy is outside the scope of this volume. Tachment, but, in fact, most people who use historical methods have had little choice but to do research for its own sake, whether their discipline is history itself, sociology, economics, political science, literary studies, or epidemiology.

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Some historians have helped create this situation by insisting on professional de. In recent decades, however, historical methods have become subordinate to experimentalism and model building in university curricula for the social sciences and public health and in the priorities of most of the organizations that sponsor research in the hope of ameliorating social problems. Historical inquiry was also essential for the study of epidemiology and public health.

Practitioners of historical methods once dominated the social sciences. For more than a generation, men and women who rely primarily on historical methods have been losing influence as educators and as advisors to public officials. These urgent historical questions are being asked at a time when the study of history often appears less relevant to public affairs than it did in the past. Most often these questions have been about contemporary social and epidemiological history: Why did the disease emerge when and where it did? How has it spread among members of particular groups? Others have asked how societies have responded to epidemics in the past, and still others have questioned how the past will affect the future: What does the history of medical science and public health in this century suggest about our ability to control the epidemic and eventually to cure the disease? Since the epidemic was first identified in 1981, scientists, physicians, public officials, and journalists have frequently raised historical questions. FoxĪcquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome-AIDS-has stimulated more interest in history than any other disease of modern times. ― 1 ― Introduction: AIDS, Public Policy, and Historical Inquiry Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M.

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