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ISBN: HB: 9780300186635

Yale University Press

July 2013

384 pp.

23.5x15.6 cm

7 black&white illus.

HB:
£53,00
QTY:

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Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine

A collection of ten essays paired with substantial prefaces, this book chronicles and contextualizes Roger Cooter's contributions to the history of medicine. Through an analysis of his own work, Cooter critically examines the politics of conceptual and methodological shifts in historiography. In particular, he examines the "double bind" of postmodernism and biological or neurological modelling that, together, threaten academic history. To counteract this trend, suggests Cooter, historians must begin actively locating themselves in the problems they consider. The essays and commentaries constitute a kind of contour map of history's recent trends and trajectories – its points of passage to the present – and lead both to a critical account of the discipline's historiography and to an examination of the role of intellectual frameworks and epistemic virtues in the writing of history.

About the Author

Roger Cooter is the Wellcome Professorial Fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University College London and has worked as a research fellow at both the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester. He is the author of numerous articles, several books, and is co-editor of the journal Medical History. He lives in London and Coventry.

Claudia Stein is an associate professor of history at the University of Warwick.

Reviews

"In the 21st century there is no arena of history more contested than that of biomedicine. Roger Cooter's 'Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine' (written with Claudia Stein) is the first serious attempt to look at the historiography of medicine as an index of the debates about meaning and its generation within these debates. Whether examining questions of biopower in biomedical science, the new materialism and its claims at truth, or looking at the analysis of specific themes, such as the history of HIV/AIDS and its representation, Cooter and Stein provide detailed and critical looks at the shifting assumptions within the history of biomedicine. This is more than an important book from two seminal thinkers: it is a call to examine the shifts in the writing of bio-history and their underlying political assumptions" – Sander Gilman, author of "Difference and Pathology"