Tārīkh-i pizishkī i.e., Medical History

Historical sociology of medicine is considered as an interdisciplinary field, the intersection of history, sociology and medicine. This discipline, which is, in fact, the medical sociology of earlier societies based on historical documents and reports, is considered to be one of the relatively young members of the social science family and one of the blossoms of this large family. This branch of science, despite its high talent and many trustees, has probably not achieved significant development due to the lack of historical resources and sources commensurate with the concerns and expectations of social science researchers, especially regarding ancient human societies ....

At the outset of the 20^th century, it became widely accepted that death ad fertility rate in many western countries has declined. This historical experience has led to the appearance of the major population theory, i.e. demographic transition or transition theory. Knowledge of the health transition in every country is one of the most important pieces of data that is used in the social development program and the plans for providing, maintaining, and promoting social health. The main purpose of this paper is to study the historical change in the global model of health and illness. A quantitative historical-comparative study has been used. Using a data collection method for health and epidemiologic data, that part of the data related to demographic change and its effect on health conditions that have not yet been seriously taken into consideration, are gathered and analyzed. Health transition is based on demographic and epidemiologic transitions. Health transition is a well-recognized and scientific idea affected by two balanced transitions, tat are demographic and epidemiologic transitions. The economic-social development of Iran in the past two or three decades has resulted in a dramatic change in the demographic and epidemiologic indices of the country. For this purpose, the data regarding censuses and demographic studies at a 45-year interval and the data regarding death at a 30-year interval has been used, and through the comparison of the demographic and epidemiologic indices, the health conditions of the country at various times and its current conditions are presented.

Historical research has always tried to deal with those past actions of human that have a social sense, and the phenomena related to historical sociology of medicine can be explained appropriately by the method of path dependency. This article is mainly aimed at developing the path dependency analysis as an effective approach in the study of historical sociology of medicine. In this study, in order to study the full details of medical cases, the findings of the conceptual grounds have been compared with the supporting documentation. The results indicate that in the framework of path dependency, two major sequences may be studied. The first type is called the path dependency analysis of self-strengthening sequence. These sequences are first shaped and then reproduce an institutional model of medicine. The second type of the path dependency of analysis is called reaction sequence. In path dependency, the researcher pays a special attention to the final link of the chain, which is regarded as the result. Path dependency studies emphasize the deviating cases of medicine too. Historical orientation in all aspects of sociology is improving, but no unique orientation is necessarily observed in any of the cases. Path dependency analysis is not inherently good or bad. Rather, it is a potential method in the historical sociology of medicine, and it can be regarded as a historical paradigm for medical knowledge.

Dualism and segregation of body and soul was an important convention set forth for the first time by Plato, developed by Christianity, soared with a comprehensive and absolute philosophical originality by Descartes, changed into a precise and logical strong rampart by Kant, and became a metaphysic phenomenon above the world and the history of the world with Hegel. Throughout this process, human was considered as a spiritual teleos. In modern days, a tendency to value body more than soul has appeared. Attention to the totality of the body was a concept in the phenomenological philosophical system of the conception introduced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and was explained fantastically. Merleau-Ponty aims to study the identity of body and mind, and of body and perception. Mind may not be laid in a milieu of understanding once independent from body. For him, we are body-based documentations and body is the existence of human in the world and human approach to the world is our anchorage in the world and our medium for having a world, and this is not the world itself that should be considered as the origin. In his opinion, we can never imagine ourselves without any body and perception. We are our perceptive-bodily orientation I the world, and mind or consciousness is emitted from this perceptive-bodily orientation. This way, Merleau-Ponty, based on the relation to life and lived experience and building on the foundation of attention to minor affairs, in a transition from phenomenology to anthropology, has provided some theoretical and philosophical-logical foundations for the advert to the human body as an essential aspect of Being-In-The-World. Through such a concept, he has founded obvious grounds and logical principals for the studies and arguments in the new critical anthropological knowledge and the anthropology of body, medical sociology, medical history, medical philosophy, and every field of study related to human body.

The main concern of this article is the process of vaccination against smallpox in Iran in the nineteenth century. Smallpox has been one of the most common diseases in the past two centuries especially amongst children. According to historians, it was one of the leading causes of the child mortality in Iran. The article involves a history of the smallpox and vaccination in Iran at first, and then describes the common methods of vaccination at those years. It emphasizes that the vaccination against smallpox was carried out in various forms even in the modern way, which was supposed to be done in various form. Eventually, the goal is to show that it is very likely that the inoculation in some traditional forms was limited exclusively to a few tribes or clans in Iran at least during two centuries before the introduction of modern vaccination. This is in contrast with the idea of some medical historians who believe that Iranians had been familiar with inoculation before the introduction of the modern way of vaccination. In response to this issue, some oppositions and resistances against vaccination have been considered in this article.

Michel Foucault, who due to his rhetorical and critical approach, has exerted dramatic effects on sociology, history, philosophy, and political philosophy, has a particular disposition towards history which is very different from typical approaches in history, under the influence of the teachings of Nietzsche and scholars such as Georges Canguilhem and Gaston Bachelard. Foucault thinking and his works are categorized into two periods of genealogy and archeology. Despite of the differences in the works and thoughts of Foucault in these two periods, the basic assumptions of the thoughts of Foucault are identical in the two periods. One of the most important works of Foucault on the genealogical period is a book titled the clinic birth. The Clinic birth provides the possibility of rewriting medical history and doctor-patient relationship. In this book, Foucault explains the performance of medical knowledge at various ages and indicates the inaccuracy of the linear approach to history and the collective approach to science. The preset article studies the main ideas in the clinic birth after introducing the genealogical method.

Medicine and health in modern society have influenced every aspect of society and affected various phenomena. Ethical issues, doctor-patient relationships, and cultural categories are considerably important. This article studies the role of ethics, cultural categories, and medicalization processes in society. Body is a field that has been influenced dramatically regarding medicine and cultural categories. The obtained ideas and analyses and the results indicate that ethics in the field of medicine has a close relation with cultural and social trends and the associative components, such that with the appearance of new processes and its effects on the behavior of individuals, it has caused the function of some aspects of health such as plastic surgery and attention to body to change and influence medicine. The doctor, as an important and influential individual in the modern society plays an important role in the trend of medicine of society and the issues related to the ethics of medicine. If the relationship between a doctor and a patient and between them and the whole society is a proper, ethical and committed relationship, we would have a healthy society and healthy individuals.

In this article, after a sociological review of the medical history of ancient times, the sociological approaches and models of health and illness before the appearance of modern medicine have been studied, with an emphasis on the characteristics of three main systems of ancient medicine including the medical system of ancient Greece (humoral pathology), the medical system of ancient China (acupuncture), and the ayurvedic medicine of ancient India (Ayurveda). The main focus of these systems, unlike individualistic systems, has been on metaphysical factors and phenomena. The most principle feature which is common in these systems is the determination of an illness on the basis of balance or lack of balance the main elements of the body, in which the lack of balance would be associated with internal or external (natural) forces. In this regard, illness was considered as an impersonal phenomenon, and the concept of “balance” was the basis of the etiology of illness.