This book examines the history of medicine as a sub-discipline within the medical humanities and its possible contributions to dealing with medical uncertainty. It investigates how the history of medicine reduced intolerance for ambiguity among medical students in the past, and can continue to do so today. Using several case studies, the second part of this volume illustrates the long-term and varied nature of questions of uncertainty in the history of medical practice. Starting with concrete examples, it explores the extent to which physicians have openly discussed such issues or, alternatively, attempted to hide them under a cloak of expertise.
Contributors are: Sari Aalto, Rolf Ahlzén, Niels De Nutte, Pieter Dhondt, Jolien Gijbels, Rachel Irwin, Saara-Maija Kontturi, Virginia Langum, Måns Lindén, Suvi Rytty, Petr Svobodnż, Evelina Wilson, and Jonatan Wistrand.
Pieter Dhondt, Ph.D., KU Leuven (2005), is Senior Lecturer in General History at the University of Eastern Finland. He has published extensively on European university history, including Student Revolt, City, and Society in Europe: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Routledge 2017), co-authored by Elizabethanne Boran.
Sari Aalto, Ph.D., University of Helsinki (2016), is Docent in the History of Science and Ideas at the University of Helsinki. She works as executive director of the Finnish Historical Society and in the research project of the history of Akava. Among other books, she has published Vaihtoehtopuolue. Vihreän liikkeen tie puolueeksi (Into 2018).
Anne Katrine Kleberg Hansen, Ph.D., University of Copenhagen (KU) (2014), is senior research consultant at The Royal Danish Academy Architecture, Design, Conservation. She specialises in the history of medicine with a particular focus on issues of fatness and paediatrics.
Saara-Maija Kontturi, Ph.D., University of Jyväskylä (2021), is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her research focusses on medical history from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, especially the history of physicians and their professionalisation.
