Brain Battles: Locating the History of Neurosurgery

Abstract

This dissertation explores the history of neurosurgery from multiple perspectives – national and international, internalist and externalist, long-term and temporally-focused – thereby seeking to do justice to the diversity of authorial voices that characterize the historiography of this medical specialty. At a more fundamental level, the dissertation draws on the history of neurosurgery as a case study to analyze the historiographic divide between physicians and professional historians that characterizes the history of medicine more broadly. To accomplish this goal, this dissertation comprises three chronologically organized parts, each containing one chapter that conforms to the medical historiographic culture of physicians and one that conforms to the medical historiographic culture of professional historians. Together, the chapters paint a colorful picture of neurosurgery’s past while simultaneously exposing the profound historiographic schism that cleaves the history of medicine. Following the six chapters, the theme of the divergent medical historiographic cultures of physicians and professional historians will be revisited in the discussion. Here, the numerous medical-historiographic differences will be untangled based on a comparative analysis of two of the chapters of the dissertation and personal reflections on several revealing interactions with physicians and professional historians. The discussion will conclude with a series of recommendations to start bridging “the two cultures” in the history of medicine. These recommendations include the creation of common ground, fostering intellectual exchange, facilitating interdisciplinary education, and exploring innovative research methods and outreach strategies. As a whole, the dissertation seeks to address an audience of healthcare professionals and professional historians. While healthcare professionals may be naturally drawn to the technical chapters and professional historians to the more contextualized chapters, those who gravitate towards one half of the dissertation are invited to read the other half. The recommendations put forth in this dissertation are neither exhaustive nor final; others are invited to join the conversation and to contribute to a future history of medicine that is not only attentive to the greatest possible variety of voices from the past but also celebrates diversity among its own ranks in the common pursuit to reconstruct medicine’s multifaceted past to the benefit of humanity.