Activiteit: Talk or presentation at a workshop/seminar
Description
Historians have argued that the rise of modern hospital medicine since the end of the eighteenth century led to the disappearance of the patient’s narrative. Patients’ stories about illness and health were largely replaced by physical diagnoses when physicians started focusing on observable physical symptoms instead of patients' emotions and experiences. Yet, even in the context of medical specialization in 20th-century hospitals, patients' stories remained indispensable for doctors in making diagnoses. This paper examines the influence of the patient’s voice on doctors in the gynaecological department of the Academic Hospital in Utrecht in the 1920s.