ABSTRACT
The influence of the movement in French historiography known as the Annales school upon medical historians has been incalculable. In 1947, a professor on the medical faculty at Strasbourg University wrote the Annales’ first medical historical article, a discussion of the decline of malaria in France. Underlying the biological and demographic perspective was the suggestion that human factors, such as changes in the peasant economy, were most pertinent to the problem of the decline of malaria. The Annales was and is a learned journal founded in 1929 by two professors then at the University of Strasbourg, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. The Annales output in medical history, although modest quantitatively is perceptible and shows a definite pattern of development. In the 1960s, after an interval of more than a decade, the Annales, under the aegis of Fernand Braudel, took up, this time in a systematic and sustained way, an inquiry into bio-medical aspects of history.
