DIALOGUES IN HISTORIOGRAPHY Historiography and Historians of Neuroscience: Towards Diversity in the ISHN

This article introduces and critiques the historiographical tradition of the history of the neurosciences as it has been established in the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN). The founding members of the ISHN were practitioner-historians, practitioners of the neurosciences with an interest in the great moments, ideas and controversies in the history of their field. The historiographical precedent set by these clinician-historians emphasized those aspects of history most interesting to them. Academic historians bring a different approach to the history of the neurosciences, particularly an interest in studying the intellectual and cultural contexts of both the inherited and the forgotten ideas about the nervous system. Their approach to history has not been well represented in the ISHN, in part because the current historiographical tradition does not address their interests. This article highlights the methodological and epistemological differences between academic and practitioner-historians and discusses the difficulties that other historical societies have faced in trying to bring them together. The article then suggests ideas for symposia that might facilitate an interdisciplinary dialogue and a revised historiographical tradition that speaks to the needs of both academic historians and practitioner historians.     

MAKING HISTORY BY CONTEXTUALIZING ONESELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS HISTORIOGRAPHICAL INTERVENTION

This essay argues that, in their reflection of theoretical positions, autobiographies by historians may become valid historical writings (that is, both true narratives and legitimate historical interpretations) and, as a consequence and simultaneously, privileged sources for historiographical inquiry and evidence of its evolution. At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, following the model established by Carolyn Steedman, historians such as Geoff Eley, Natalie Z. Davis, Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Dominick LaCapra, Gerda Lerner, William H. Sewell, Jr., Sheila Fitzpatrick, and John Elliott created a new form of academic life‐writing that has challenged established literary and historiographical conventions and resisted generic classification. This article aims to examine this new historical‐autobiographical genre—including the subgenre of the “autobiographical paper”—and highlights its ability to function as both history (as a retrospective account of the author's own past) and theory (as a speculative approach to historiographical questions). I propose to call these writings interventional in the sense that these historians use their autobiographies, with a more or less deliberate authorial intention, to participate, mediate, and intervene in theoretical debates by using the story of their own intellectual and academic trajectory as the source of historiography. Traditional historians’ autobiographies, including ego‐historical essays, have provided us with substantial information about the history of historiography; these new performative autobiographies help us to better understand historiography and the development of the historical discipline. Interventional historians seek not only to understand their lives but also to engage in a more complex theoretical project.     

Neurobiographies: Writing Lives in the History of Neurology and the Neurosciences

This essay surveys the present state of biographical writing in the history of neurology and neuroscience. Individual lives play a significant role in practitioner-historians' narratives, whereas academic historians tend to be more nonindividualistic and a-biographical. Autobiographies by neurologists and neuroscientists, and particularly autobiographical collections, are problematic as an historical genre. Neurobiographies proper are published with several aims in mind: some are written as literary entertainment, others as contributions to a cultural and social history of the neurosciences. Eulogy, panegyrics and commemoration play a great role in neurobiographical writing. Some biographies, finally, are written to provide role-models for young neuroscientists, thus reviving the classical, Plutarchian biographical tradition. Finally, a recent cooperative biography of Charcot is mentioned as an example of how the biographical genre can help overcome the alleged dichotomy between the historiographies of practitioner-historians and academic historians.     

Neurobiographies: writing lives in the history of neurology and the neurosciences

This essay surveys the present state of biographical writing in the history of neurology and neuroscience. Individual lives play a significant role in practitioner-historians' narratives, whereas academic historians tend to be more nonindividualistic and a-biographical. Autobiographies by neurologists and neuroscientists, and particularly autobiographical collections, are problematic as an historical genre. Neurobiographies proper are published with several aims in mind: some are written as literary entertainment, others as contributions to a cultural and social history of the neurosciences. Eulogy, panegyrics and commemoration play a great role in neurobiographical writing. Some biographies, finally, are written to provide role-models for young neuroscientists, thus reviving the classical, Plutarchian biographical tradition. Finally, a recent cooperative biography of Charcot is mentioned as an example of how the biographical genre can help overcome the alleged dichotomy between the historiographies of practitioner-historians and academic historians.     

略论钱谦益对明代史学的认识

钱谦益指出记注制度缺失、实录流布民间以及官方对本朝重大事件记载失实是造成明代"三史"舛驳的原因。他批评师心自用的俗学,直陈史学界存在的三种谬误,倡导恢复尊经重道、严谨求实的治史传统。钱谦益既效仿郑晓和王世贞辩证明代史事的治学路向,又批评并纠正了两人不少谬误。     

Does the History of Medicine Begin where the History of Philosophy Ends? An Example of Interdisciplinarity in the Early Modern Era

Abstract

A popular saying attributed to Aristotle states that ‘medicine begins where philosophy ends’—but this principle does not seem entirely valid for the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when medicine and philosophy were considered to be integral parts of the same branch of knowledge. For this reason, although today medicine and philosophy are clearly distinct disciplines, historians of ideas cannot study them entirely separately. Indeed, since the early modern era was a period of profound revision of knowledge, probably only a truly interdisciplinary investigation can identify the conceptual shifts and transfers capable of reinstating medicine in its fundamental role in the development of civilisation and modern thought, in particular as a model of a rational knowledge aimed at improving the social good through a fitting interpretation of experience. This article intends to offer arguments in support of such a historiographical approach, and to illustrate certain interesting methodological ideas that emerge from a study in which the history of philosophy and history of medicine cross-pollinate.     

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY CONFRONTS THE LONGUE DURÉE

This review of John Potts's Ideas in Time: The Longue Durée in Intellectual History discusses the advantages and disadvantages of writing intellectual histories that embrace the longue durée. It applauds Potts's concise account of historiographical discussions of continuity and discontinuity in the history of ideas in the last seventy-five years but laments his failure to discuss the contributions of historians of science and scholarship to the practices of knowledge-making and to the transmission of ideas. It suggests that the study of discontinuities can also be rich and revealing, and it proposes one approach to understanding the ways in which ideas go out of fashion. It concludes by noting, first, that the models that contemporary historians of ideas adopt also have to do with book-market opportunities and pressures and, second, that we have work to do to engage our contemporaries and students in whatever form of intellectual history we choose to write.     

The Un-European Idea: Vichy and Eurafrica in the Historiography of Europeanism

Imperialist and collaborationist conceptions of Europeanisms have generally been excluded from mainstream historiography with reference to their alleged un-Europeanness. However, by discussing the ideas and writings of two French Europeanists—Louis Le Fur’s and René Viard’s—in the years 1940–41, I argue that it is precisely their Vichyite and imperialist conceptions of Europeanness that underpin their political ideas of a united Europe. Their works therefore call into question a prevailing historiographical narrative of Europeanism as a benign counterpoint to a dark European past. Since, as demonstrated in this article, French Europeanist visions have often been bound up with both collaborationist and imperialist interests, I argue for the need to develop a more inclusive and critical historiographical perspective on the history of Europeanism.     

What Time Is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural) Historiography

Rather than reflect on the process of an alleged "modernization" of historical scholarship, an intercultural comparison of historiography should take the European origins of academic history as its starting point. The reason, as this article argues, is that in non-European countries the European genealogy of the discipline of history continued to structure interpretations of the past. Both on the level of method, but more importantly on the level of interpretive strategies, "Europe" remained the yardstick for historiographical explanation. This article will use the example of postwar Japanese historiography to show that historians resorted to a European model in order to turn seemingly unconnected events in the Japanese past into a historical narrative. This is not to imply, however, that Japanese historiography passively relied on concepts from Western discourse. On the contrary, Japanese historians appropriated and transformed the elements of this discourse in the specific geopolitical setting of the 1940s and 1950s. This act of appropriation served the political purpose of positioning Japan with respect to Asia and the "West." However, on an epistemological level, the priority of "Europe" persisted; Japanese historiography remained a "derivative discourse." Studies in comparative historiography, therefore, should be attentive to these traces of the European descent of academic history and privilege the transnational history of historiography over meditations on its internal rationalization.     

Contesting Conquests: Nineteenth-Century German and Polish Historiography of the Expansion of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Union

The problem of conquests and territorial expansion, including their interpretation, evaluation, and legitimisation, has been crucial for European national historiographies. Consequently, attempts by the Holy Roman emperors, particularly of the Saxon and Hohenstaufen dynasties, to control Italy and Burgundy were hotly debated among nineteenth-century German historians, while Poland's union with Lithuania, and the annexation of the vast territories of the east which followed, was a central topic for Polish historians of the time. Modern historians of historiography in both countries have carefully analysed these narratives, emphasising their ideological and political contexts, such as their involvement in the Grossdeutsch versus Kleindeutsch controversy and the controversy between the so-called Cracow and Warsaw historical schools. In this paper I propose a comparative analysis of these two discourses which dealt with analogical issues and, as I demonstrate, developed with a parallel dynamic. Such an analysis, I argue, allows an escape from the paradigm of national exceptionalism, and the discovery of what was typical or, perhaps, constitutive of the discourse on territorial expansion of the time, instead of focusing on the uniqueness of the national context. This analysis embraces the conceptualisation, argumentation, and rhetoric of those nineteenth-century German and Polish historians discussing the expansion of the medieval Holy Empire and early-modern Poland. Moreover, it locates their interpretations within an international context of a broader Western historiographical tradition, involving issues of domination, cultural transfer, and colonialism. Finally, it examines the parallel mechanism of searching for, advocating, and perpetuating the idea of uniqueness of national history.     

Getting started: objectives and justifications in the history of neurology

Contemporary historiographical ideas have the potential to enrich the history written by practicing neurologists. Neurology is a science, and historians of neurology might profit from considering the experiences of historians of other sciences. An explicit consideration of the range of possible objectives, justifications, sources and methods of historical research may open new and exciting avenues of inquiry. Any plausible answer to the question, "What does a historian do when he or she sits down to write history" helps an historian to develop the structure of his or her project. The selection of sources for a historical study is improved, if also expanded, by understanding its aims.     

中西比较视域中的宋代史学近世化:基于历史观与史学方法的考察

对比西方来看中国历史与史学问题,是中国史学近代转型接受西方学术框架所带来的一种学术视域。如果将西方区域化,那么,可以看到,宋代和作为西方史学近代化起源的文艺复兴一样出现了历史观与史学方法的革新,是中国史学“近世化”的开端,也是接触西方之前原生性的带有近代化特征的史学前近代阶段。由此可见中西史学近代化过程中的一致性与中国史学近代化的内在动力。     

THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER?

Alon Confino has issued a desideratum to other historians that they should bring questions and insights from cultural history to bear on the study of the Holocaust. Taking the work of Saul Friedländer as his point of departure, Confino nonetheless sets out on a path different from Friedländer's. He turns away from the goal of “integrated history” and instead seeks to investigate the realm of German culture, understood as encompassing much more than just Nazi ideology. By analyzing how the Holocaust has come to be perceived as unprecedented, as a rupture in human history, and furthermore by treating Jewish victims' sense of disbelief as an artifact of the past, one that has continued to inform unduly the historical understanding of the Holocaust up to the present day, historians will be able to account anew for what made the persecution and extermination of Jews imaginable and thus possible. With Confino's approach, a major historiographical question resurfaces, however: namely, what place an analysis of non‐Germans should occupy in the history of the Holocaust, and in particular what place should be accorded to Jewish voices? This essay argues that we cannot make sense of why Germans supported and carried out the Holocaust without also considering Jewish contemporaneous perspectives and imaginings.     

Learning soft skills the hard way: Historiographical considerations on the cultural adjustment process of German-speaking émigré neuroscientists in Canada, 1933 to 1963

ABSTRACT

This article is a historiographical exploration of the special forms of knowledge generation and knowledge transmission that occur along local cultural boundaries in the modern neurosciences. Following the inauguration of the so-called “Law on the Re-Establishment of a Professional Civil Service” in Nazi Germany on April 7, 1933, hundreds of Jewish and oppositional neurologists, neuropathologists, and psychiatrists were forced out of their academic positions, having to leave their home countries and local knowledge economies and traditions for Canada and the United States. A closer analysis of their living and working conditions will create an understanding of some of the elements and factors that determined the international forced migration waves of physicians and clinical neuroscientists in the twentieth century from a historiographical perspective. While I am particularly looking here at new case examples regarding the forced migration during the National Socialist period in Germany, the analysis follows German-speaking émigré neurologists and psychiatrists who found refuge and settled in Canada. These individuals form an understudied group of refugee medical professionals, despite the fact that the subsegments of refugee neurologists and clinical psychoanalysts in the United States, for example, have been a fairly well-investigated population, as the works of Grob (1983), Lunbeck (1995), or Ash and Soellner (1996) have shown. This article is primarily an exploration of the adjustment and acculturation processes of several highly versatile and well-rounded German-speaking physicians, who had received their prior education in neurology, psychiatry, and basic brain research. They were forced out of their academic home institutions and had to leave their clinical research fields as well as their disciplinary self-understanding behind on the other side of the Atlantic.     

The Little Revolution in New South Wales, 1808

In this article, ‘Development’ and developmentist ideas, two increasingly fashionable areas of historical inquiry, are explored in the context of relations between the United States and Brazil through the middle decades of the twentieth century, with three arguments made along the way. First, and in contrast to much academic and extra-academic received wisdom (as well as the official pronouncements of US diplomats), the United States government offered no singular or consistent approach to ‘development’ in its dealings with Brazil. Second, an unofficial vision of development (here termed ‘market developmentalism’) that has so far eluded the attention of historians of developmentalist ideas emerged earlier than the official developmentalisms that have been the main object of historiographic interest to date. Third, this unofficial, largely private, consumption-oriented developmentalism is shown to have enjoyed an outsized influence in Brazil, dwarfing the influence enjoyed by those inconsistent varieties of developmentalism espoused by US diplomats between the 1940s and the 1960s.     

Making History, Talking about History

Making history—in the sense of writing it—is often set against talking about it, with most historians considering writing history to be better than talking about it. My aim in this article is to analyze the topic of making history versus talking about history in order to understand most historians' evident decision to ignore talking about history. Ultimately my goal is to determine whether it is possible to talk about history with any sense.
To this end, I will establish a typology of the different forms of talking practiced by historians, using a chronological approach, from the Greek andRoman emphasis on the visual witness to present-day narrativism and textual analysis. Having recognized the peculiar textual character of the historiographical work, I will then discuss whether one can speak of a method for analyzing historiographical works. After considering two possible approaches—the philosophy of science and literary criticism—I offer my own proposal. This involves breaking the dichotomy between making and talking about history, adopting a fuzzy method that overcomes the isolation of self-named scientific communities, and that destroys the barriers among disciplines that work with the same texts but often from mutually excluding perspectives. Talking about history is only possible if one knows about history and about its sources and methods, but also about the foundations of the other social sciences and about the continuing importance of traditional philosophical problems of Western thought in the fields of history and the human sciences.     

Getting Started: Objectives and Justifications in the History of Neurology

Contemporary historiographical ideas have the potential to enrich the history written by practicing neurologists. Neurology is a science, and historians of neurology might profit from considering the experiences of historians of other sciences. An explicit consideration of the range of possible objectives, justifications, sources and methods of historical research may open new and exciting avenues of inquiry. Any plausible answer to the question, “What does a historian do when he or she sits down to write history” helps an historian to develop the structure of his or her project. The selection of sources for a historical study is improved, if also expanded, by understanding its aims.     

Archaeology,Ethno‐history and Oral Traditions: Approaches to the Indigenous Past

Indigenous groups across the world are actively looking to maintain or rediscover their past. Many historians and archaeologists are sympathetic to their quest. As a result different ways of narrating the past are in action: oral tradition, ethno‐history and archaeology.

In the following the potential of each approach is discussed. In particular the possibility for collaboration between indigenous approaches and academic disciplines is evaluated. The focus is on the interpretative narrative, rather than on cultural heritage management. It is argued that we need multivocality as well as collaboration and integration of narratives.