Offers reflections, provocative questions, and practical strategies for ethical, responsible approaches to health history.
In Do Less Harm, editors Courtney E. Thompson and Kylie M. Smith bring together a group of leading historians and scholars to confront one of the most pressing questions in health history: How can we ethically approach stories of medicine and health without perpetuating harm? This thought-provoking collection invites readers into a crucial conversation about the responsibilities of historians when documenting the past.
Through carefully curated essays, the contributors explore the ethical dilemmas that arise in researching, teaching, and writing about the history of health care. From patient privacy to the politics of archives, the essays cover how health histories have often overlooked, misunderstood, or misrepresented the people and communities most affected by medical practices. The contributors challenge the assumptions of the field, offering a more thoughtful approach to historical research—one that emphasizes empathy, accountability, and inclusivity.
The book raises provocative questions and proposes practical strategies for historians and scholars to do less harm in their work and is organized around key themes such as research, teaching, writing, and public engagement, making it an indispensable resource for anyone working in the history of health care, ethics, or the health humanities. With its engaging style and accessible insights, Do Less Harm offers a fresh and timely perspective for academics, students, and readers interested in the ethical challenges of representing the past.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Field Guide to Doing Less Harm
Courtney E. Thompson and Kylie M. Smith
Part I. The Historian
1 Becoming an Ethical Historian
Richard A. McKay
2 Positionality and the History of Medicine
Barron H. Lerner
3 Reparatory History
Kylie M. Smith
4 Accessibility
Nicole Lee Schroeder
5 Advocacy and Activism
Jess Dillard-Wright
Part II. Archives and Museums
6 Decolonizing Archives and Museums
Shelley Angelie Saggar
7 Advising around Human Remains Collections
Melissa Grafe
8 Identifying the Human in Human Remains Collections
Aisling Shalvey
9 Stewardship of "Challenging" History of Medicine Collections
Amanda L. Mahoney
10 Disability, Archives, and Museums
Katrina Jirik
11 The Commercialization of Remains and Records
Aparna Nair
Part III. Research
12 Ethics and Ghosts beyond the Institutional Review Board
Marco Antonio Ramos
13 Silences and Violence
Ayah Nuriddin
14 Patients and Survivors
Jonathan Sadowsky
15 Writing Ethical Medical History with Legal Sources
Lauren MacIvor Thompson
16 Expert Witnessing History
Stephen T. Casper
Part IV. Writing
17 Names
Adria L. Imada
18 Diagnoses and Language
Claire D. Clark and Amy C. Sullivan
19 Writing about Images
Michaela Clark
20 Citation
Courtney E. Thompson
21 Peer Review and Editing
Ahmed Ragab
22 Cultivating Ethical Strategies in Digital Health Humanities
Britt Dahlberg and Jessica Martucci
Part V. Teaching
23 Centering the Margins
Antoine S. Johnson
24 Images and Primary Sources
Beatriz Pichel
25 Discomfort and Compassion in the Classroom
Cornelia Lambert
26 The Problems with Partners
Sharrona Pearl
27 Teaching Graduate Students about Ethics
Shannon K. Withycombe
28 The Ethics of Teaching Future Health Professionals
Lan A. Li
Conclusion: The Expanding Ethics of Doing Health History: A Personal Journey
Susan M. Reverby
Coda: A Report, a Turn
Courtney E. Thompson
Appendix A: Ethical Questions for Health Historians to Consider
Appendix B: Recommended Readings
Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Courtney E. Thompson is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. She is the author of An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America. Kylie M. Smith is an associate professor and the director of the Center for Healthcare History and Policy at Emory University. She is the author of Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing.
Review :
What marks [Do Less Harm] apart is the honesty of its contributors. The book reads like an exercise in soul-searching, of souls searching for redemption for themselves and on behalf of their field.
—Lancet
