History of the Human Sciences

Historiography on the emergence of the Human Right to Health (HRH) and the positive definition of health in the World Health Organization (WHO) Constitution has largely traced their roots to social medicine. This article complements that view by examining the genealogy of both through the influence of Mental Hygiene (MH) and its entanglement with eugenics. The conceptual framework interweaves Michel Foucault's and Giorgio Agamben's perspectives on the convergence of sovereignty and biopolitics. The analysis covers developments from the early to mid-20th century, including the rise of MH and its key innovations and displacements, such as the individual–environment adjustment matrix, its eugenic connections, and the emergence and shifts of child guidance and the interdisciplinary turn. These trajectories are shown to converge in the WHO's constitutional process through Brock Chisholm's biopolitical project to produce an apolitical, well-adjusted, efficient, and fully pacified “world citizen”—an ideal he embedded in the HRH and promoted as the Constitution's final drafter and the organisation's first director-general. The article concludes that the HRH represents both a landmark in the pursuit of social justice within the welfare-state matrix and a product of dis/ableist and sanist technocratic rationality that must be recognised and urgently redressed.

This article maps the entangled (re-)birth of pathological gambling as a medical issue in 1980s West Germany, exploring how self-help group members and ‘psy’ scientists negotiated expertise on excessive gambling behaviour. Taking into account transnational contacts and transfers, it argues that self-help groups played a crucial role in the construction of pathological gambling as an illness. First, the article shows how it was gamblers who – supported by transnational connections and media coverage – were a driving force in the pathologisation of their own behaviour by establishing ‘experiential expertise’ through self-help groups. Second, it demonstrates how professionals reinforced their authority of interpretation over the topic of excessive gambling against the backdrop of the already existing self-help movement by either rejecting or embracing the illness concept prevalent among Gamblers Anonymous. Finally, the article shows how, on the one hand, self-help groups relied on psy-knowledge and its producers, and how, on the other hand, the groups as well as the notion and practice of experiential expertise were integrated into professional therapies, thereby creating a fusion of experiential and scientific expertise into a larger therapeutic health system.

In 1972, psychologist Jerome Kagan boldly proclaimed that research he had recently conducted on the Maya of Guatemala would overturn the most cherished assumption in his field of child development. He insisted that early deprivation did not doom a child to a lifetime of debility. These children, even without recourse to expert intervention, proved remarkably ‘resilient’ against life's many hardships. Despite his priority in using the term, Kagan's Guatemala study rarely appeared in reviews of resilience as the concept entered the psychological mainstream in the 21^st century. Now ubiquitous in psychological science, community activism, and humanitarian policy, the nature of resilience's ‘ordinary magic’ has proved elusive. The absence of Kagan's study from these narratives illuminates what does and does not count as psychological resilience. I identify three historical prerequisites for the emergence of contemporary resilience theory. The first is the ‘discovery’ after World War II of how early ‘deprivation’ led to lifelong psychic damage, and the mobilization of this knowledge in critiques of the welfare state. The second precursor was the rise of psychiatric epidemiology as a way of knowing where the actuarial risk factor became ontologically real. A final prerequisite was the coloniality of being in an Anglophone field's fascination with, often literal, island communities for natural experiments among the poor. This genealogy illuminates the historical expansion of psychological damage from trauma resulting from a discrete, extraordinary event to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) combining and accreting in the body. It shows how resilience functions as both a critique and an intensification of therapeutic culture.

The article explores the transnational circulation of sound-based expertise that came together in the establishment of audio forensics in Cold War Poland and Czechoslovakia. It is the first to study the Polish Phonoscopy Lab, the first ever audio forensic police department, founded in 1963 to carry out original research on speaker identification and distorted speech. It shows the complexity of sound dissection science behind the Iron Curtain, where detailed methodology, the use of precision technological equipment, and the application of up-to-date phonetic, acoustic, and linguistic knowledge, as well as practical guidelines for trained group listening, were developed. It argues that by developing such methodology, the Polish and Czechoslovak phonoscopy labs were leading the way in reformulating the notion of sound-based objectivity in forensics. By examining the transfer of methods, theories, technological devices, and visions between the Cold War East and West, the article shows that from the point of view of the development of expertise, there were specific advantages of the embeddedness of forensics in the structures of the totalitarian state, which granted access to technologies, ensured a steady supply of cases, and simplified investigation procedures.

This article traces the divergent approaches to the scientific analysis of facial and bodily movement from the 1950s to the 1970s. Drawing on the writings and exchanges of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ray Birdwhistell, as well as psychologists Paul Ekman and Silvan Tomkins, it shows how their intellectual divide was sustained through different uses of visual technologies and coding practices. Cultural anthropologists working in dialogue with cybernetic thought prioritized the interpretive role of culturally patterned observers and remained cautious about relying on visual instruments to extend human perception. Psychologists, in contrast, oriented their attention toward the measurable physical changes captured in film and photographs, treating images less as interpretive mediators than as naturalistic recordings of human behavior. This divide crystallized around the concepts of code: either as culturally shaped rules that could be deciphered by trained observers or as discrete, machine-readable units inscribed through computerized techniques. By examining how professional identities, technological instruments, and the definitions of facial expressions as a scientific object took shape in the mid-20^th-century, this article demonstrates why these historical dynamics remain crucial for understanding the stakes of living with our faces coded in the era of automated facial expression analysis.

This article explores a programme of dream analysis carried out by Major Kenneth Hopkins during the Second World War, conducted in the unlikely circumstances of a POW camp. Hopkins, who was captured in 1940 and held in two camps within Germany, collected and analysed over 500 dreams from his fellow prisoners. The article seeks to place this project within historical context, connecting it to other dream analysis projects, including that of Mass-Observation (M-O), which was contemporary to Hopkins. Hopkins’s project has clear similarities to other observational cultures in the interwar period, including both M-O and popular ornithology. It also seeks to explore the motivation behind Hopkins’s attempts to collect dreams, his bibliography and sources, and his goals for the project. Ultimately, Hopkins’s analysis combined psychological and psychoanalytic theory with experimental and observational techniques to produce what he conceived to be a unique insight into the psychical impact of imprisonment. Hopkins’s death in 1942 prevented him from publishing the results of his analysis, but it exists as an early example of what would later be called ‘citizen science’ focused on the mind in captivity.

This article explores a duality inherent in care between the treatment of disease and the care of the person; or, as Winnicott might put it, between the dimensions of cure and care. It shows how these two dimensions are distinct from one another, despite their entanglement in care practices, and argues that their effect in practice varies sharply according to the situation. Taking as a starting point Nathalie Zaccaï-Reyners’s analysis of the care of dependent older adults in nursing homes (EHPADs), I argue that the care–cure dimensions may be understood as a particular case of the more general duality of our relation to the world and to others. I then consider Hartmut Rosa’s account of this duality, between an instrumental relation and a relation of resonance. According to Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, this duality in our relation to the world arises from a distinctly human property: the capacity to sustain a double relation both to the environment and to oneself, at once immediate and mediated through the perspectives of others. Plessner characterizes this condition as the human being’s ‘eccentric’ or decentered positionality. Understanding this duality at the core of ordinary human experience – and the continual adjustments required to preserve its equilibrium – may shed light on the duality inherent in care, where balance must likewise be ceaselessly recalibrated, in response to circumstance, between its different dimensions.

This paper demonstrates the important role that Oswald Spengler's skeptical philosophy played in motivating Edmund Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences (1936). To date, almost no scholarship has considered the place of Spengler in Husserl's critique of philosophical skepticism and his philosophy of history. To underscore the relationship between Spengler and Husserl, this paper draws extensively from a previously ignored and untranslated source in English scholarship: the Spenglerheft (1921), published in the journal Logos, which Husserl co-edited. These essays, published during the Spengler-Streit, anticipate many of the arguments which Husserl would develop a decade later in the Crisis. They thereby evidence that Husserl's turn to the philosophy of history in the Crisis participated in a broader effort to overcome a Spengler's philosophical skepticism, and that Husserl's method clearly builds on arguments being levelled explicitly against Spengler in the Spenglerheft. The Spenglerheft emerges as a critical moment in advancing a philosophically robust dialogue between Spengler and Husserl.

Across the mental health professions, the metaphor of “boundaries” serves to designate a metaethics of therapist–patient conduct that ranges from the clinical setting to the therapeutic relationship. Though once rare, by the 1990s, boundary nomenclature had attained a notable presence, designating tangible limits to therapists’ conduct. Like fences at a precipice, clinical boundaries were introduced to safeguard therapists from perilous missteps. Mapping a variety of potential dangers, the metaphor and associated lexicon evolved most obviously from growing wariness of therapists’ sexual involvement with patients, though was informed too by the rising challenges of litigation, managed care, and the vagueness of professional codes. Being a neologism without language specific to any therapy system, the metaphor transcended many professional disagreements. Intrigued by its endurance as a ubiquitous instrument without philosophical, legal, or empirical grounding, our study explores discursive devices that bolstered its success. Early proponents capitalized on a metaphor's capacity to make visible some forms of therapy and hide others while obscuring an authorial purchase. Terminology like “slippery slope” and “boundary flexibility” highlighted therapists’ vulnerabilities to transgression yet also sustained ambivalence about the parameters of safety. Diagnoses of therapist boundary violators as psychologically impaired shifted attention toward risks facing “normal” as well as disordered practitioners, and case study vignettes enacted boundaries just as they dramatized therapists’ missteps. In its enduring success, clinical “boundaries” joined company with other professional neologisms which were motivated by then-current problems and engineered by professionals in ways that reshaped their work.

This article analyzes the historical emergence of a decidedly cinematic approach to social-scientific experimentation: The shift from a model of inquiry in which film serves as a tool to record kinetic events generated under experimental conditions to one in which experimental situations are arranged and filmed narratively to maximize their demonstrative power. This evolution becomes starkly visible when one compares the pioneering use of film by Wolfgang Köhler in his studies of chimpanzee intelligence on the eve of World War I with the techniques that his protégé and colleague Kurt Lewin would adopt in the 1920s and refine in the 1930s. By the time Lewin produced his famous motion picture of democratic and authoritarian “group atmospheres,” and in active dialogue with developments in avant-garde filmmaking, an unabashedly cinematic mode of social-scientific inquiry had become acceptable. This mode of inquiry aligned the production of laboratory events with codes of documentary filmmaking recognizable to mass audiences, so as to speak more directly to those audiences’ political stances. The article draws on this history to reflect on the revelatory power of modes of experimentation that establish a genuine relationship with the medium in which they seek to make social phenomena manifest.

Empathy is considered to be an important aspect of any care relationship. However, not all authors agree on a definition of this concept nor on the facets that compose it. In order to contribute to this debate, this article will propose a study of the sources of empathy, which are to be found in early intersubjectivity. In this context, the research carried out 40 years ago by the developmental psychologist Daniel Stern is particularly significant. Stern discovered the complex process of affect attunement between a mother and her baby and found that this phenomenon underpins the dynamics of interpersonal communion and communication. In light of these insights, we will apply the affective attunement model to the care relationship in hospitals through an analysis of two clinical examples. These examples will enable us to identify the bi-directional dimension of affective attunement, which enables a patient to be active in the healthcare relationship, to do his/her ‘patient’s work' (Anselm Strauss), and to empower him or herself. Finally, these hypotheses concerning attunement and misattunement in the care relationship will lead us to a de-idealised and arguably more realistic conception of empathy.

This article tracks the influence of the Soviet school of gerontology and geriatric medicine on international science and medical practice during the second half of the 20^th century. Beginning with the initial development of this school of gerontology in the 1930s, this article shows how the Soviet influence on international ideas of ageing, geriatric medicine, and biological gerontology was significant, especially through the institutional scientific-medical networks established by the United Nations and the World Health Organization. This influence, moreover, was based on work conducted over the decades by the Kyiv-based Institute of Gerontology, which established itself as the centre of Soviet research on ageing and its application to medical and social care for older persons. By considering how the doctors and scientists in Kyiv were able to access international scientific networks and influence global gerontological discourses in the 1960s–1980s, this paper shows the enduring influence of Soviet concepts of biological ageing and related medical practice.

This special issue of History of the Human Sciences offers a comparative exploration of the medical or health humanities in France and the United States, highlighting both convergences and divergences in their intellectual trajectories. While French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Georges Canguilhem, and Paul Ricoeur are widely cited in Anglophone scholarship, the distinctively French traditions within the field remain underexplored. Conversely, the Anglo-American medical humanities gained visibility in France only in the late 2010s. This volume traces the evolution of the field in both contexts, emphasising the French focus on norms, vitality, and the negative, and the Anglo-American emphasis on hidden values, cultural determinants of health, the biopsychosocial model, and narrative. A shared commitment to the concept of care emerges as a key point of convergence. The issue includes contributions on the philosophical foundations of care (Lefève and ffrench), the linguistic and conceptual challenges of translating ‘care’ across traditions (ffrench), and the phenomenological and affective dimensions of caregiving (Pachoud and Schwering). It also features empirical and collaborative research on care practices (Aujoulat and Ricadat), a philosophical analysis of recognition and agency in clinical encounters (Rashed), and a critical gerontological perspective on narrative and ageing (Zimmermann). The final article (Vickers) offers a genealogical account of the narrative-based medical humanities (1980–1995), arguing for its foundational role in shaping the field. Together, these articles aim to foster greater cross-cultural dialogue and methodological pluralism, offering a critical ontology of care that integrates existential, social, and biological dimensions of health and illness.

In this article, we shall discuss the role of collaborative and transdisciplinary research, and its potential for the co-production of scientific and field knowledge that may serve the purpose of the medical humanities. Transdisciplinary research adds to the challenge of interdisciplinary dialogue – that of involving societal stakeholders to whom the research is accountable. The outcome of such research, in terms of generating knowledge that be both scientifically sound and useful for practice, depends on the quality of the partnerships that are created and constantly discussed and adjusted. We argue that the dialogue between researchers, patients, and clinicians, as well as between disciplines and methods, which is key in this type of research, is likely to increase healthcare providers’ sensitivity to their patients’ emotional and social states and needs, as well as their reflexivity about their own experiences and practices. We are, however, aware of some possible risks and drawbacks associated with this type of research. These are acknowledged and discussed. An important issue in researching the lived experience of chronic illness is that of identity work. We shall use this conceptual category to illustrate, with reference to our own work, the role of triangulating concepts and methods from different disciplines, the role of involving relevant stakeholders in meaningful ways, and the role of the researchers’ own subjectivity and reflexivity in constant dialogue with those of the co-researchers, while conducting research on phenomena of significance to the field of medical humanities.

As Britain’s first professor of epidemiology, Major Greenwood (1880–1949) is an important figure in the formalisation of British epidemiology. His contribution derives less from enduring methodological innovations than from his advocacy for analytical statistics in medicine; his analytical focus on health at the population level; his emphasis on the social and environmental determinants of health; and his capacity to translate these ideas for government action. Over three chronological sections, this article details how Greenwood’s feted career – and the institutionalisation of British epidemiology – derives from his particular approach to epidemiology and from its growing political and economic utility. The first section shows how Greenwood’s population-level perspective developed from eugenic analyses of medical and demographic data. The second illustrates how Greenwood’s career gathered momentum during the First World War, with epidemiology offering insight into the conditions of military and industrial labour. Finally, as the government’s go-to medical statistician and chair of Epidemiology and Vital Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Greenwood’s interwar career evidences the newfound relevance of epidemiology for both British and British-imperial government. Greenwood’s biography illustrates how and why epidemiology gathered biopolitical relevance prior to the advent of the National Health Service. Despite personally advocating for more generous government spending, Greenwood’s epidemiology offered a means to maximise health outcomes for the largest number of people, facilitating the economising logics necessary for early-century state medicine. Ultimately, Greenwood’s career provides a vehicle to understand how epidemiological reasoning responds to political-economic demands, here gaining purchase and patronage amidst the industrialism, militarism and imperialism of Britain’s early 20th century.

In this article, I consider the turn to narrative theory that swept through the medical humanities in the 1980s and 1990s. My primary goal is to offer what may be the first historical overview of the field in its decisive second phase (the first running roughly from 1960 to 1980). My focus will be on the efforts of scholars to mobilize ‘narrative’ and related terms to develop the medical humanities as a distinctive field of study. My approach will be genealogical, aiming to identify and delineate the various narrative theories that were put to use, and the aims they were intended to serve. The rise of the narrative-based medical humanities coincided with, and drew strength from, two enormously significant developments in the health sciences, broadly construed. The first was the rise of the biopsychosocial model of health and illness. The second was the refounding of medical anthropology along Geertzian lines by a group of social anthropologists based at Harvard. I offer detailed characterizations of four accounts of narrative (social anthropological, cognitive anthropological, psychological, and bioethical) focusing on why the scholars associated with each discipline turned to narrative and what they did with the concept. Collectively these effected a powerful critique of biomedical rationality. In the second half of the article, I summarize the achievement of the narrative-based medical humanities and consider what they have to offer scholars in the field today.

This article presents a comparative historical analysis of the development of the medical humanities in the United States and France. In the US, the field evolved through three major phases: an initial focus on human values and bioethics in the 1960s; a second phase from the 1980s emphasising culture, narrative, and transdisciplinary approaches influenced by the social anthropology of medicine and the biopsychosocial model; and a third phase, emerging in the 1990s, centred on structural forces in relation to health, exemplified by Paul Farmer's use of the concept of structural violence. In contrast, the French medical humanities, institutionalised from 2010, emerged from the integration of the humanities and social sciences (SHS) into medical education. Rooted in a tradition of critical engagement, French scholars draw heavily on the philosophy of Georges Canguilhem, particularly his vitalist conception of life as a normative struggle against limitation. The article explores how Canguilhem's influence, largely underappreciated in Anglophone contexts, offers a powerful framework for rethinking health, illness, and care. It also examines the differing receptions of Michel Foucault in both traditions, proposing a re-reading of Foucault through Canguilhem's writings. The authors argue that the French emphasis on care, normativity, and the lived experience of illness – especially through the emerging field of ‘la philosophie du soin’ – offers a valuable counterweight to the more institutionally critical orientation of Anglophone medical humanities. The article concludes by proposing a renewed dialogue between these traditions, grounded in a shared commitment to understanding medicine as a human, social, and philosophical practice.

Should medical humanities lie in an instrumental relation to medicine, assisting healthcare practitioners to conduct their work in more humane ways? Or should it understand itself as an independent research discipline that can critique medicine without the burden of instrumentality to the aims of medical practice? Medical humanities scholarship has offered a lively debate on this issue, which continues to this day. This article examines a recent contribution to this debate: Critical Medical Humanities. This approach is sceptical of the paradigm of instrumentality, proposing instead to reinvigorate radical strands from the history of medical humanities towards a truly independent transdisciplinary approach. However, Critical Medical Humanities faces a range of epistemological, political, and methodological problems that arise from a lack of sufficient constraint by the point of view of agents engaged in the medical pathway (such as doctors and patients). This renders the Critical Medical Humanities analysis epistemologically incomplete and ethically/politically problematic, the latter since it can constitute misrecognition of the agents’ points of view. Towards a solution, the article offers a methodology, a dialectics of change, that can engage radical medical humanities analysis while negotiating recognition and influencing practice.

In the late 1960s, Latin American social scientists from different ideological backgrounds collaborated with the Institute of Latin American International Relations (ILARI), an organization linked to the former Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). What factors led these sociologists to engage with ILARI, and what kind of sociology were these different actors promoting? This article answers these questions by examining two cases of intellectual collaboration, represented by the Uruguayan Aldo Solari (1922–89) and the Colombian Orlando Fals Borda (1925–2008), who staged an intellectual controversy about scientific sociology and political engagement in the pages of Aportes, ILARI's flagship journal. I argue that while ILARI was a Cold War organization that promoted the social sciences as part of the CCF's broader strategy, it relied on the intellectual work of Latin American sociologists, who had their own ideas on sociology and political engagement. This resulted in the circulation of Latin American sociological discourses across the Cold War lines.

The beginnings of formal epidemiology are conventionally marked by the introduction of mathematical modelling in the early 20th century. However, Ronald Ross, colonial medical officer and 1902 Nobel laureate for his proof of the insect vector of malaria, envisioned the future of mathematical epidemiology as a much more expansive project, one that would eventually exceed the remit of a medical science. This article introduces and analyses Ross’ theory of happenings as an attempt to generalise the concept of contagion as a non-material form of social organisation. To contextualise this approach, I explore the parallels and the common references between the mathematical method of epidemiologist Ronald Ross, and the work of sociologist Gabriel Tarde, who wrote Laws of Imitation (1890), to establish a relative and universal sociology. Both conceptualisations of contagion disregard a meaningful boundary between the natural and social world, they focus on affect and affectedness to embrace a radical plasticity in the human subject, both champion a philosophy of the infinitesimal to reject simplistic causes for social processes and to analyse large occurrences by focus on the vanishingly small. These parallels provide an opportunity to challenge assertions of a schism between the social sciences and the project of formal epidemiology, and to instead consider the contours of a different kind of social theory at the heart of the modern epidemiological project.