Bulletin of the History of Medicine (BHM) is developing a new section that examines two areas that have become increasingly significant to the field: the historical study of how medical knowledge is taught and transmitted, and the methodological challenges that arise when historians of medicine engage with contemporary health concerns. Both topics have long been embedded within the broader project of BHM, which has always treated medical knowledge as a social formation shaped by institutions, intellectual traditions, and the shifting distributions of authority. By establishing a dedicated place for this work, BHM seeks to encourage submissions that scrutinize the processes through which historical understanding is produced, circulated, and used across different scholarly and public settings.
Essays on teaching are expected to move beyond reporting classroom practice to pursue analytical questions about how historical thinking develops within the pedagogical space. The history of medicine occupies an unusually complex position in curricula that involve medical students, public health practitioners, historians, and professionals from allied fields. This complexity reveals the tension between disciplinary expectations and the broader cultural narratives that students bring with them. Submissions may investigate how particular narratives, such as the rise-and-fall story of medical authority, the mythology of scientific objectivity, or the linear account of therapeutic progress, shape students’ assumptions and how historical instruction disrupts, reframes, or complicates these assumptions. Authors might examine the epistemic Labor required to teach students to read archival absences, silences, and ambiguities; or analyze how the use of material sources, patient testimonies, legal records, or visual evidence transforms the kinds of questions students pose about the past. Essays could also explore how pedagogical choices intersect with broader historiographical debates, such as those concerning biopolitics, colonial medicine, medicalization, or the history of evidence-making practices.
BHM also invites essays that consider what it means for historians of medicine to engage directly with contemporary publics, health institutions, or activist networks. Publicly oriented scholarship in this field has expanded in recent years, particularly as historical knowledge is increasingly mobilized in debates about health inequity, environmental exposure, chronic disease, surveillance medicine, and reproductive justice. Yet this work generates its own methodological challenges. Authors may interrogate how the historian’s interpretive authority operates when the subjects of study are also participants in ongoing political or clinical struggles. They may explore how historical research interacts with epidemiological knowledge, legal frameworks, or ethical guidelines, and how these encounters shape the historian’s choices about narrative, evidence, and analytical scale. Submissions that analyze the friction between scholarly detachment and community accountability, or that trace how archival research acquires new meaning when it enters public controversies, will be especially welcome. The aim is to elicit essays that treat engaged scholarship not as an extension of service work but as a site in which the historian’s conceptual tools, interpretive commitments, and epistemological assumptions are actively tested.
Given the distinct character of this material, essays submitted to this section will undergo a review process separate from that used for full research articles. Each submission will be evaluated by the Editor and an external reader, without anonymity. Manuscripts should be approximately three thousand words, excluding notes. They should advance a sustained historical argument, demonstrate familiarity with the historiography of medicine, and reflect critically on the pedagogical or public contexts in which historical knowledge is produced. Work that has been published previously, whether online or in print, cannot be considered.
Submissions can be made through the journal’s online system. Authors are asked to specify whether their essay addresses the teaching of medical history or scholarship that engages with contemporary medical and public health concerns so that it can be routed appropriately. Questions may be directed to the editorial office.