The reappearance of the sick man: a landmark publication revisited

Abstract

There has been much cause to celebrate Leicester in the recent past, but this year marks a little-noted academic anniversary.Forty years ago, in the second of two seminal papers, Nicholas Jewson helped to recast medical historiography.Earlier historians of medicine focused on scientific developments, the origins of theories and treatments.Hitherto, intellectual progress had been regarded as the inexorable driver of therapeutic and institutional advance.A sociologist at the University of Leicester, Jewson was one of a new wave of researchers for whom medicine was a social phenomenon, shaped by wider political, economic, and cultural influences. 1 Jewson was concerned in this paper with what he called 'the disappearance of the sick man' from medical cosmology in the period from 1770 to 1870. 2 He used the term 'medical cosmology' as shorthand for the prevailing theories and practices that defined the nature of medical discourse at that time.He sought to demonstrate how the social relations underpinning 18th-century medicine had been supplanted -with major consequences for knowledge and practice that endure to the present day.

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