Bulletin of the History of Medicine (BHM) advances scholarship that explains how ideas about health, illness, and care have taken shape across different cultures, periods, and knowledge systems. Its scope brings together research from the humanities and the health sciences to show how medical thought and practice emerge through scientific inquiry, social experience, and institutional power. By emphasizing historical depth and methodological rigor, BHM supports work that not only reconstructs the medical past but also clarifies how its legacies continue to influence contemporary health care, professional authority, and public life.
- Arts and Humanities: Studies that analyze medical knowledge through humanistic interpretation, including cultural meaning, symbolic representation, social experience, and intellectual inquiry. This includes work on healing traditions, therapeutic worldviews, biomedical authority, caregiving roles, public responses to disease, and the moral frameworks that shape medical decision-making. Submissions in this area often draw on textual analysis, visual culture, philosophy, ethics, and cultural theory to explain how medical ideas circulate and why they matter.
- Medicine: Analyses that investigate the evolution of medical expertise, diagnostic reasoning, therapeutic innovation, and the production of scientific authority. This includes studies of laboratory practice, clinical decision-making, medical technologies, and the social contexts that influence scientific change.
- Nursing: Scholarship exploring the historical formation of nursing as a profession, the changing nature of caregiving, Labor, community-based care, and the relationship between nursing practice and broader medical and political structures. Work in this area often highlights voices and experiences that have been underrepresented in traditional medical histories.
- Knowledge, Interpretation, and Evidence: Work grounded in critical engagement with sources such as archival materials, clinical records, institutional reports, visual and material objects, oral narratives, or cross-cultural comparisons. These contributions highlight how evidence is assembled, interpreted, and used to answer questions about medical theory and practice.
- Medicine, Institutions, and Social Life: Research that analyzes how medical ideas operate within social structures, professional communities, and systems of governance. This includes studies of expertise, regulation, health policy, professional identity, and the ways medical authority interacts with social expectations and institutional priorities.
- Global and Comparative Perspectives: Studies that examine medical concepts, healing traditions, or professional systems across regions and cultures. These contributions place medical ideas in wider intellectual and social networks, showing how practices develop through exchange, translation, negotiation, and adaptation.