Health, Work, and Environment: A Hippocratic Turn in Medical History

The changing ways in which human surroundings interact with human bodies have yielded some of the field's most innovative scholarship. These developments reflect trends in health and medicine from the late twentieth into the early twenty-first centuries. This article concentrates on a few representative areas where this intermeshing of socio-cultural with Hippocratic history has proven especially fruitful. It begins with the changing consideration of industrial health history. It discusses that fuller range of social and political contexts and contingencies have shaped the recognition and control of the industrial hazards and have brought new depth and realism to our understanding of the health history of industrial workplaces. The assertions and conclusions about worker influence on the outcome of struggles over occupational health have helped generate greater interest in just how workers themselves perceived and experienced these ailments.