Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes strategies that they themselves adopted in research projects for which the availability of the computer has made in-depth analysis possible to a degree that proved far too daunting to scholars in pre-computer age. It suggests how perhaps the most promising basis for a genuinely ‘total history’ lies in starting from ‘total sources’. The book looks at a future medical history that will benefit more fully from advances in parallel fields of inquiry and make its own fuller contributions to them as well. In a collection entitled Modern Methods in the History of Medicine, Edwin Clarke called for the emancipation of the history of medicine from its thraldom to biobibliography and narrative. Specialist historical demographers, legal scholars and social historians have in many cases pioneered novel and highly fruitful methods for digesting and interpreting the formidable and often intractable sources.