See, earlier: Today's Doctors Feel Oppressed By The Heroes Of Medicine's Past
All across the world, Medical Students of Color are demanding that the portraits of heroes of medicine that often are displayed in medical schools be canceled on the grounds that too many of the Heroes are white men, which makes the SoC suffer bad feelings.
When you start reading up on the history of scientific medicine (which to put on my Foucaultian hat) was socially constructed not too many generations ago — before a certain date, doctors tended to kill more patients than they cured on average — you quickly discover that there are an enormous number of heroes of medicine, the vast majority you’ve never heard of. So the resentful SoC do have a point: there are an enormous number of dead white men whom they ought to admire.
For example, 2019 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Maurice Hilleman, a guy I’d never heard of. He invented 8 of today’s 14 standard vaccines: mumps, measles, rubella, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia, and Hemophilus influenza type B. By some estimates, he saved the lives of more people than any other medical innovator in history.
But who is more admired in academia: Hilleman or Foucault?
