Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Title	Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Discipline	History of medicine
Abbreviation	Bull. Hist. Med.
Publisher	Johns Hopkins University Press
Country	United States
History	1933–present
Frequency	Quarterly

Bulletin of the History of Medicine is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering the history of medical practice, public health, and biological sciences from antiquity to the present. Founded in the early 20th century and currently published by Johns Hopkins University Press, the journal has featured scholarship on figures, institutions, and events that shaped medical thought in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Its pages have hosted archival studies, biographies, and interdisciplinary analyses linking primary sources from libraries, museums, and archives to broader narratives about health and disease.

History

The journal was established during a period of institutional consolidation that involved scholars associated with the Johns Hopkins University, the American Medical Association, and the Wellcome Trust, responding to interests championed by historians connected to the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the British Museum. Early contributors included researchers influenced by the work of Sir William Osler, René Laennec, and Thomas Sydenham, while later decades saw articles referencing archival collections at the National Library of Medicine, the Wellcome Library, and the Rockefeller Archive Center. During the Cold War era the journal published material intersecting with histories of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences, the Pasteur Institute, and the Karolinska Institutet, and it chronicled debates reflected at conferences such as meetings of the American Historical Association and the International Congress of the History of Science and Technology.

Scope and Content

The journal covers clinical biographies of figures like Hippocrates, Galen, Ibn Sina, Andreas Vesalius, Ambroise Paré, William Harvey, Edward Jenner, Florence Nightingale, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Sigmund Freud, and Alexander Fleming, as well as institutional histories of the Royal Society, the Royal College of Physicians, the Mayo Clinic, Bellevue Hospital, Charité, Guy's Hospital, and the Massachusetts General Hospital. It addresses episodes such as the Black Death, the 1918 influenza pandemic, cholera epidemics in London and Calcutta, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Smallpox Eradication Programme, and debates surrounding vaccination campaigns by the Pasteur Institute and the World Health Organization. The journal publishes archival studies drawing on collections from the Wellcome Library, the National Archives (UK), the Smithsonian Institution, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Vatican Library, situating medical texts, casebooks, and patent records within social histories that reference figures like Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud when relevant.

Editorial Structure and Publication

The editorial board has historically included scholars affiliated with Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania. Editors have overseen peer review by specialists linked to professional organizations such as the American Association for the History of Medicine, the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, the Royal College of Surgeons, and the History of Science Society. The journal appears quarterly and has issued special thematic volumes on subjects like nineteenth-century medical reform, colonial medicine in India, tropical medicine tied to the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and twentieth-century biomedical research associated with the Rockefeller Institute, the Pasteur Institute, and the Max Planck Society.

Abstracting and Indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in major bibliographic services that cover humanities and medical history, including Historical Abstracts, JSTOR, Scopus, PubMed/MEDLINE, Web of Science, and ProQuest. Libraries such as the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and university libraries at Princeton University and the University of California system provide catalog access. Its contents are discoverable through platforms used by researchers connected to institutions like the Wellcome Trust, the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, and the European University Institute.

Impact and Reception

Scholars have cited the journal in debates involving the historiography of figures such as René Descartes, Ignaz Semmelweis, Joseph Lister, John Snow, and Paul Ehrlich, and in studies engaging with methodological approaches from social history, microhistory, intellectual history, and the history of science informed by citations to works by Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, and Ludwik Fleck. Reviews of the journal have appeared in outlets associated with the American Historical Review, Isis, Medical History, and the Lancet, and its articles have influenced museum exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection and the Science Museum in London, as well as curricular developments at institutions like the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Notable Articles and Contributions

Noteworthy contributions include archival reconstructions of the life and practice of Edward Jenner, manuscript studies on Galenic anatomy, epidemiological histories of the 1918 influenza linked to analyses of military records from World War I and the U.S. Army Medical Corps, and investigations of colonial public health policies in British India and French West Africa. The journal has published influential pieces on the development of bacteriology with reference to Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Alexandre Yersin, and Émile Roux; on psychiatric institutions involving Philippe Pinel, Emil Kraepelin, and Franz Nissl; and on pharmaceutical innovation tied to Eli Lilly, Bayer, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline. It has also featured interdisciplinary essays that connect medical iconography, manuscript illumination studies at the Bodleian Library, and archival medicine collections at the Huntington Library and the Newberry Library.

Category:Academic journals Category:History of medicine journals