The Patient's View: Doing Medical History from below Author(s): Roy Porter Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Mar., 1985), pp. 175-198 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/657089 . Accessed: 10/04/2013 19:27 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Theory and Society. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 131.113.213.135 on Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:27:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 175 THE PATIENT'S VIEW Doing Medical History from Below ROY PORTER Medicine today is a supremely well-entrenched, prestigious profession, yoked to a body of relatively autonomous, self-directingscience, expertise, and practices. It is hardly surprising, then, that it has tended to produce histories of itself essentially cast in the mold of its own currentimage, stories of successive breakthroughs in medical science, heroic pioneers of surgical techniques, of the supersessionof ignorant folkloric remediesand barefaced charlatanry through the rise of medicine as a liberal, ethical, corporate profession. Even historians and historical sociologists who have taken more skeptical views of medicine's past, perhaps stressing its failures or underlin- ing the self-servingfeatures of professionalization,have neverthelessimplic- itly endorsed the view that the history of healing is par excellence the history of doctors.