ABSTRACT
During the past decade, historians have paid increasingly close attention to the ways in which individual historical figures are remembered, represented and commemorated, and especially to how their images change over time, being refashioned to serve particular social, political and intellectual agendas. In part, this reflects a wider historical preoccupation with appropriation, representation and storytelling as important cultural practices. At the same time, it reflects a growing historical awareness that, in the process of constructing cultural heroes, nations, social movements and professions alike create models that embody their aspirations, validate their endeavours and reaffirm their perceptions of self. Recent studies in the history of medicine on John Hunter, René Laennec, Louis Pasteur and Walter Reed have shown that, as one historian lucidly put it, ‘the way in which the idol is conceived is affected by the interests of those who claim to be his acolytes’.1 Collectively, such studies have gone beyond the banal observation that medical and scientific heroes are appropriated and reconfigured to serve the contingent, and sometimes divergent, agendas of their commemorators: they begin to show how selective depictions of medical heroes and anti-heroes give the historian a revealing window into the cultures that produced particular representations.
