Title: Writing and re-writing the history of cancer Medicine
Speaker: Carsten Timmermann
Date & Time: April 26, 5:00 PM IST and 12: 30PM BST
Description: Traditionally the history of biomedicine has been written as a celebratory story of progress, and this is how it is still predominantly represented in mainstream media and perceived by the majority of the population. Over the past three to four decades, in the wake of the anti-authoritarianism of the 1960s, and drawing on new approaches in the social sciences, a new historiography has emerged, which has critically assessed the fundamental assumptions and beliefs behind biomedicine. In this talk I will be drawing on my research on the history of cancer medicine to engage with some of these assumptions. My goal is to inspire a conversation about the place of the historiography of biomedicine in the broader scholarly framework of the medical humanities.
Carsten Timmermann is a historian of 19th and 20th-century medicine and biomedical science at the University of Manchester, UK. He has published on the history of concerns with high blood pressure as a risk factor, the history of lung cancer, the history of cancer chemotherapy, and more recently also aspects in the history of psychiatry. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/carsten.timmermann.html
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