Main description:

Communicating the History of Medicine critically assesses the idea of audience and communication in medical history. This collection offers a range of case studies on academic outreach from historical and current perspectives. It questions the kind of linear thinking often found in policy or research assessment, instead offering a more nuanced picture of both the promises and pitfalls of engaging audiences for research in the humanities.

For whom do academic researchers in the humanities write? For academics and, indirectly, at least for students, but there are hopes that work reaches broader audiences and that it will have an impact on policy or among professional experts outside of the humanities. Today impact is more and more discussed in the context of research assessment. Seen from a media theoretical perspective, impact may however be described as a case of 'audiencing' and the creation of audiences by means of media technologies. -- .

Contents:

List of figures
List of tables
1 Introduction: audiences and stakeholders in the history of medicine - Solveig Julich and Sven Widmalm
2 Creating reflective citizen-physicians: teaching medical history to medical students - Frank Huisman
3 Feeling great? Practice, institutionalization and disciplinary context of history of medicine in Germany - Ylva Soederfeldt and Matthis Krischel
4 Writing history as it happens: the historian's dilemmas in a time of health-care reform - Beatrix Hoffman
5 The audiences of eugenics: historiographical and research political reflections - Lene Koch
6 Striking a chord: physician-publics, citizen-audiences and a half-century of health care debates in Canada - Sasha Mullally and Greg Marchildon
7 Mansions in the Orchard: architecture, asylum and community in twentieth-century mental health care - Sarah Chaney and Jennifer Walke
8 Swedish sex education films and their audiences: representations, address and assumptions about influence - Elisabet Bjoerklund
9 On 'the use and abuse' of medical history 'for life': a disrupted digression on productive disorder, disorderly pleasure, allegorical properties and scatter - Michael Sappol
10 Audiences and the history of medicine - Ludmilla Jordanova
Index -- .