ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that the history of disease-concepts deserves far more attention than it has traditionally been accorded, not least because this theme is relevant to the full range of medical history’s existing concerns, from anatomy to medical practice. The profound and pervasive contrast between the approaches of Fleck and of Quetel stems from a radical difference in conceptions of the cognitive, of the social, and of their interrelationship. But perhaps the most telling index of the dominance of the naturalist-realist approach is that its assumptions pervade even some of the leading attempts to historicize medical knowledge in general, and apprehensions of disease in particular. To adapt to the present context what Steven Shapin once wrote about the sociology of scientific knowledge, one can either debate the possibility of the history of disease-concepts or one can go out and write such a history.
