This paper is strongly biased by my own practices as a historian mainly working on the nineteenth and twentieth century in Western Europe. The question of how to write a pre-1800 medical history from a European perspective will not be touched upon.
Some of the challenges for the European Union are addressed in Didier Georgakakis, “Le Covid-19, un tournant pour l’Union européenne?” aoc media – Analyse Opinion Critique (blog), 9 April 2020, https://aoc.media/analyse/2020/04/09/le-covid-19-un-tournant-pourlunion-europeenne, last accessed 2 January 2021.
The European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (eahmh), one of the sponsors of this journal, was set up in 1989; see also the general Editorial. The other sponsor of ehmh, the Swiss Society of the History of Medicine and Sciences, was founded 70 years earlier, in 1921.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
Richard Drayton and David Motadel, “Discussion: The Futures of Global History,” Journal of Global History, 13 (2018): 1–21, here 5, doi: 10.1017/S1740022817000262.
Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” in Race, Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Jr Gates (Chicago, IL, 1985), 175.
Lynn Hunt, “Is European History Passé?” Perspectives, 40 (2002), 5–7.
Peter Schöttler, Geschichtsschreibung als Legitimationswissenschaft: 1918–1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1997).
Martin Conway and Kiran Klaus Patel, eds., Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches (Basingstoke, 2010).
This often very teleological (and ideologically burdened) approach has recently been impressively revisited by Kiran Klaus Patel, Projekt Europa: Eine kritische Geschichte (Munich, 2018).
Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).
Hubert Steinke, Irritating Experiments: Haller’s Concept and the European Controversy on Irritability and Sensibility, 1750–90 (Amsterdam–London, 2005).
Benoît Majerus, “Lieux de Mémoire – A European Transfer Story,” in Writing the History of Memory, ed. Stefan Berger and Bill Niven (London, 2014), 157–171.
There are examples of “Rue de Pasteur” in France but also in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Poland, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, etc.
Laurence Cole and Philipp Ther, “Introduction: Current Challenges of Writing European History,” European History Quarterly, 40 (2010), 588.
“Editorial Board,” European Journal of Cancer, 1 (1965); “Editorial Board,” European Journal of Cancer and Clinical Oncology, 21 (1985); “Editorial Board,” European Journal of Cancer, 40 (2005).
Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times (London, 1999).
Charles Webster, “Medicine and the Welfare State 1930–1970,” in Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth Century, ed. Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (London, 2000): 125–140, here 125.
Patricia Clavin, “Time, Manner, Place: Writing Modern European History in Global, Transnational and International Contexts,” European History Quarterly, 40 (2010): 624–640.
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2010).
See, for example, the discussion in France in 2005 when the national parliament adopted a law saying that “school curricula recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, especially in North Africa”. Sébastien Jahan, “Loi du 23 février: des manuels scolaires bien disciplinés?” Cahiers d’histoire: Revue d’histoire critique, 96–97 (2005), 187–189.
Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA, 1993).
Claire Beaudevin, Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Christoph Gradmann, Anne M. Lovell and Laurent Pordié, eds., Global Health and the New World Order: Historical and Anthropological Approaches to a Changing Regime of Governance (Manchester, 2020).
Alban Davesne and Sébastien Guigner, “La Communauté européenne de la santé (1952–1954),” Politique Européenne, 3 (2013), 40–63.
Jean-Paul Gaudillière and Volker Hess, eds., Ways of Regulating Drugs in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Basingstoke, 2012).
Thomas J. Misa and Johan Schot, “Introduction: Inventing Europe: Technology and the Hidden Integration of Europe,” History and Technology, 21 (2005), 1–19.
For an overview of the Making Europe series, see www.makingeurope.eu, last accessed 7 January 2021.
