Journal of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology
Open Access

The relationship between medicine and the study of life is as old as medication itself. Nevertheless, historians have highlighted the excellent transformation that happened in the 19th century while first physiology and then bacteriology have become important resources for the classification, diagnosis, and treatment of human diseases [1]. In that period, significant links developed between the sites specializing in biological experimentation (i.e. laboratories) on the only hand, and the locations of healing (i.e. hospitals, dispensaries) and public fitness offices at the other. Together, they helped to fashion modern, professional medicine [2]. However, many historical studies have additionally argued that this mobilization of biological knowledge exerted a limited impact on medical practice in general, and clinical practice in particular.

The transformation of biology and medicine, and their convergence after 1945, is far from being uncharted territory for historians. Several research have discovered a step change in the scale of investment in research, a new role for the kingdom as scientific entrepreneur, an increasingly fundamental level of investigation in biology and medicine, and a closer relationship between the laboratory and the clinic.

That the post-war period saw the growth of biomedical complexes characterized by the intensification of research in the life sciences, the hunt for novel molecules, and a new alliance between biologists and the state, should not obscure the fact that it also saw renewed tensions and nearby variations, which challenge any description of it as the culmination of a uniform trend. Firstly, there were tensions between three different types of medicine: experimental medicine, clinical medicine, and social medicine. Although biomedicine has, above all, been dominated by experimental medicine, other sets of practices have persisted along those employed by the experimenter, such as molecular modelling and analysis, and biomedical scientists have developed complex relationships with sanatorium clinicians and public health officials, which have numerous from arms-duration distance, to mutual inter-dependence, and extra rarely to outright collaboration.

History of biomedicine is a hybrid domain, intersecting with many other scholarly disciplines. From the 1970s, historians who investigated recent traits in medicine increasingly shared the approaches, presuppositions, and strategies of inquiry of historians and sociologists of science and technology. One reason is that the increasing reliance of medicine on technologies, instruments, and tablets makes the demarcation between “medicine,” “science,” and “industry” more difficult. Another is the “practice turn” in the records of science, which gave more attention to the ways scientists and physicians work. The impressive achievements of historians who applied these new approaches came, however, at a cost. The neglect of an earlier generation of historians of medicine may have confined extra latest pursuits for understanding health and ailment in society. Closer hyperlinks with historians of science and technology and sociologists of technology can also additionally have blurred the specificity of medicine as a domain grounded in the difference among the regular and the pathological and lessened scholars’ interest in “the clinic” as a unique site of the production of knowledge [3].

From the proposed perspective, visual representations of science (i.e. portraits, images of scientific instruments, measurement results and abstractions) are discussed as a distinct medium in which knowledge producers have transmitted and converted their findings to the acquirers of knowledge [4].

Science education often adopts a narrow view of science that assumes the lay public is ignorant, which apparently justifies a technology training confined to a promotional narrative of progress in the shape of scientific knowledge void of significant social context [5]. We endorse that to prepare students as destiny concerned citizens of a techno scientific society, science training should be informed through science, technology, and society (STS) perspectives. An STS-informed science education, in our view, will encompass the subsequent curricular elements: technology controversy training, gender issues, historical perspective, and a pass away from a Eurocentric view through looking into the distinctive patterns of other regional (in this example of Taiwan, East Asian) approaches to science, technology, and remedy. This article outlines the importance of a few fundamental STS research as a method of illustrating the ways wherein STS perspectives can, if incorporated into science education, enhance our understanding of science and technology and their relationships with society.

1. Quirke V, Gaudillière JP (2008) The era of biomedicine: science, medicine, and public health in Britain and France after the Second World War. Med Hist 52:441-452.

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2. Löwy I (2011) Historiography of biomedicine:“bio,”“medicine,” and in between. Isis 102:116-122.

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3. Nikolow S, Bluma L (2002) Visualization between popularity and scientific practice: new perspectives for the history of medicine, science, and technology. NTM 10:201-208.

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4. Wang HY, Stocker JF, Fu D (2012) New concepts of science and medicine in science and technology studies and their relevance to science education. Kaohsiung J Med Sci 28:S2-S7.

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5. Margócsy D (2017) A long history of breakdowns: A historiographical review. Soc Stud Sci 47:307-325.

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