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CANCELLED - 2017 James H. Cassedy Memorial Lecture: Making the Case for History in Medical Education

Air date: Thursday, September 28, 2017, 2:00:00 PM
Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local
Description: Unfortunately this lecture, originally scheduled for September 28, has been postponed to a later date, which will be announced in due course. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Historians of medicine have struggled for centuries to make the case for history in medical education. They have developed many arguments about the value of historical perspective, but their efforts have faced persistent obstacles, from limited resources to curricular time constraints and skepticism about whether history actually is essential for physicians. Recent proposals have suggested that history should ally itself with the other medical humanities and make the case that together they can foster medical professionalism. We articulate a different approach and make the case for history as an essential component of medical knowledge, reasoning, and practice. History offers essential insights about the causes of disease, the nature of efficacy, and the contingency of medical knowledge and practice amid the social, economic, and political contexts of medicine. These are all things that physicians must know in order to be effective diagnosticians and caregivers, just as they must learn anatomy or pathophysiology.

For more information go to https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/happening/lectures/lectures_2017.html
Author: Speaker: David S. Jones, MD, PhD, Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine, Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine, Harvard University
Runtime: 1 hour