Challenging the Madeiran Historiographical Desert on Medicine and Public Health: Critical Analysis and Possible Directions

Abstract

It is quite clear that there is an almost complete lack of Madeiran historiography on medicine and public health, whether in absolute terms or in comparative terms with other themes and fields of the archipelago’s history. I will, however, try to demonstrate this situation with some quantitative data, carrying out an exhaustive survey and a critical and interpretative analysis of the Madeiran historiography on the subject. Refusing any kind of vain polemics, we will start from the assumption that what defines Madeiran historiography is the insular spatiality of the historical objects present in the traditional or renewed fields of historical investigation.
Medicine and public health are part of a nowadays quite broad field called health sciences, even if both flow into social science fields such as sociology or anthropology of health, disease, and health professions. The option to maintain those two categories does not represent the exclusion of other sciences, but the admission, undoubtedly questionable, that those categories cover the essential of health sciences until, roughly, the end of the 19^th century. As for medicine, this category also includes surgery, pharmacy, and nursing. As for the category public health, it calls for the possibility of identifying and tracing the development of knowledge, practices, technologies, institutions, and policies that came together over time. It should also be noted that the traditional histories of medicine and public health have been enriched in recent decades with the constitution of new objects which have shifted points of view: the history of illnesses, of the sick, of the marginalised and of the bodies.
Finally, based on a quantitative survey and a critical and interpretative analysis of the Madeiran historiography on medicine and public health, as well as based on my own ongoing research, I will seek to point out possible paths for continuity and renewal of approaches.

Keywords

Madeira Islands; History; Historiography; Medicine; Public Health.