摘要：This paper applies Max Weber’s proposition regarding the differences between the ‘sciences’ to the ‘historicist controversy’: the problems emerging from opposing approaches to understanding the past. The historiography in question is the development of the ‘biomedical model’ of health and disease, and the rise of ‘medicine’ in the course of 19th century Europe and Britain. While Weber’s theoretical framework does not answer the questions posed by present-day scholars about specific historical events, it enables a critique of the process through which history is ‘constructed’, and offers an alternative approach to the ‘transformation’ of 19th century medicine.
