Annual Meetings
The Osler Medal
Advice about preparing papers:
1. Choose someone knowledgeable in the history of medicine or science to guide you while you select your topic, conduct your research, and write your paper. Your advisor should be giving you input during all stages of the process. The AAHM can assist you in choosing an appropriate advisor at your own school or another school.
2. Start thinking about your project early. Your freshman or sophomore year in medical school is a good time to begin. At that point you could identify an advisor and meet with him or her to discuss undertaking a project.
3. Choose an original research question. The question should be narrow enough to be able to answer within the page limit imposed and broad enough to be historically relevant. Possible topics might include the history of a particular disease, a medical controversy within medicine, the development of a medical specialty, the impact of a particular individual or body of research within medicine, or the development of a public health problem and the response to it. You must do a search of the historical literature to see if other papers have been written previously on the same subject. An historical literature search can be done electronically on HISTLINE, which is available for use on the National Library of Medicine website at http://igm.nlm.nih.gov. For a search of historical articles that may have been published in medical journals, use the MEDLINE database, also available on the same site. An historical or medical librarian would be helpful with this type of search.
4. Consider beginning your paper during a humanities course in medical school, during the summer months after the first or second years of medical school, or during an elective month. For those who might be interested, there are funds available to conduct research at various history of medicine libraries in the United States, including the New York Academy of Medicine, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Archives and Special Collections on Women in Medicine in Philadelphia, the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, and the Countway Library in Boston, although you need not have funding to use these libraries. A good medical librarian would again be helpful in identifying collections locally that might be of particular use to you in your research project.
5. When writing your paper, here are some general guidelines:
* state your research question clearly at the beginning of your paper and cite any previous studies that have been done on that particular question
* organize your paper so that it moves logically from one section to another
* answer the question with the best evidence you have gathered and analyzed
* avoid making generalizations or drawing conclusions about the evidence that cannot be adequately supported
* interpret the evidence without using present medical criteria to critique past medical practices (historians are less interested in whether a particular practice was "right" or "wrong" and more interested in analyzing those practices in the context of a particular time and place and in reconstructing a previous medical world and seeing it on its own terms)
* place your subject within its historical context (for example, if your paper focuses on an individual's research on a particular disease, you would want to examine how that research fit within the medical context of the time; was it different?; was it similar?; if so, why?; was it influenced or constrained by a certain philosophical approach, by economic or institutional factors, by religion?); be careful not to see each individual as a person working in isolation to achieve a certain result
* your conclusion should not only state what you discovered but also discuss weaknesses in your evidence and propose new areas for investigation