Oral History in Medicine

Summary

Oral history in medicine uses interviews and recorded testimony to access dimensions of medical experience that documentary sources cannot capture: the perspectives of patients, practitioners, and communities whose voices are absent from official records. The method does not provide unmediated access to past events but rather to the ways individuals understand their experiences in dialogue with competing cultural messages, making it simultaneously a source of evidence and a window onto the construction of medical memory.

Methodological Foundations

Paul Thompson lamented in 1991 the limited use of oral history by historians of medicine and urged more scholars to make use of it.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Raphael Samuel had already drawn attention to the value of the method in 1976, arguing that transcripts of interviews remembering a discredited doctor/abortionist were more informative about popular medicine and the ways illness was coped with in the home than “volumes of Medical Officer of Health reports.”(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

Oral testimony does not provide unmediated access to past experiences but rather to the ways individuals understand their experiences in dialogue and interaction with a range of competing cultural messages.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) This methodological self-awareness distinguishes mature oral history practice from naive empiricism: the testimony is valuable not despite but partly because of its subjective, constructed character, which reveals how medical experiences are shaped by the frameworks available to narrate them.

Institutional Programs

The Wellcome Trust set up the Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine series in 1990, bringing together people associated with particular medical events to discuss, debate, and disagree about their memories.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) These witness seminars provided a structured format for collective memory that could surface disagreements and corrections invisible in individual interviews, generating a multi-perspectival record of medical episodes that no single documentary source could provide.

Applications

Saul Benison’s history of virology based on interviews with Tom Rivers uncovered fabricated details behind key professional rivalries; rather than dismissing his witness as unreliable, Benison used this testimony to better understand professional identity and the personal and institutional dynamics of twentieth-century virology.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Sanjiv Kakar used life story interviews to develop a leprosy treatment strategy tailored to particular communities’ beliefs, social structure, and experiences, demonstrating the practical clinical application of oral history methods.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

Ronald Bayer and Gerald Oppenheimer’s interviews with seventy-six first-generation AIDS doctors in the United States drew on Alessandro Portelli’s methodology to explore what doctors thought they were doing and what the epidemic meant to them, deliberately avoiding hagiographical accounts and instead using oral testimony to reconstruct the subjective experience of medical crisis.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

See Also

• medical-historiography — Methods and approaches in the history of medicine
• patient-perspective — The patient’s experience as a subject of historical inquiry
• popular-medicine — Lay medical knowledge and domestic healing practices