Communicating the history of medicine : perspectives on audiences and impact

__Communicating the History of Medicine__ offers a collection of case studies on academic outreach from historical and current perspectives. It questions the kind of linear thinking often found in policy or research assessment, instead offering a nuanced picture of both the promises and pitfalls of engaging audiences for research in the humanities. Front matter Contents List of figures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: audiences and stakeholders in the history of medicine Creating reflective citizen-physicians: teaching medical history to medical students Feeling great? Practice, institutionalization and disciplinary context of history of medicine in Germany Writing history as it happens: the historian’s dilemmas in a time of health-care reform The audiences of eugenics: historiographical and research political reflections Striking a chord: physician-publics, citizen-audiences and a half-century of health-care debates in Canada Mansions in the Orchard: architecture, asylum and community in twentieth-century mental health care Swedish sex education films and their audiences: representations, address and assumptions about influence On ‘the use and abuse’ of medical history ‘for life’: a disrupted digression on productive disorder, disorderly pleasure, allegorical properties and scatter Audiences and the history of medicine Index Communicating the History of Medicine critically assesses the idea of audience and communication in medical history. This collection offers a range of case studies on academic outreach from historical and current perspectives. It questions the kind of linear thinking often found in policy or research assessment, instead offering a more nuanced picture of both the promises and pitfalls of engaging audiences for research in the humanities. For whom do academic researchers in the humanities write? For academics and, indirectly, at least for students, but there are hopes that work reaches broader audiences and that it will have an impact on policy or among professional experts outside of the humanities. Today impact is more and more discussed in the context of research assessment. Seen from a media theoretical perspective, impact may however be described as a case of 'audiencing' and the creation of audiences by means of media technologies This chapter explores the value and relevance of a combined academic and public engagement approach to the history of medicine. The authors consider a specific mental health project at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, in the context of a longer tradition of service user involvement in mental health research and museology. It is argued that the project’s approach presented a unique opportunity for mental health education and the reduction of stigma. These elements of the project informed the historical focus, resulting in a more inclusive history than in many institutional histories of psychiatry, focusing on the importance of space, place and architecture in twentieth-century psychiatry. The chapter concludes that community engagement within a museum setting enriches the history of medicine as a discipline and vice versa.