This article examines the process by which the London physician Thomas Sydenham (1624–89) rose to fame as the English Hippocrates in the late seventeenth century. It provides a survey of the evidence for the establishment of Sydenham’s reputation from his own writings, his professional relations, and the writings of his supporters and detractors. These sources reveal that in the first decades of his career Sydenham had few supporters and faced much opposition. However, by the end of the seventeenth century, Sydenham was the object of extraordinary outbursts of adulation and had become renowned for his decrying of hypotheses and speculative theory, his promotion of natural histories of disease, and the purported similarities between his medical method and that of Hippocrates. It is argued that Sydenham’s positive reputation owed little to his achievements in medicine: it was almost entirely the result of his promotion by the philosopher John Locke and a small group of sympathetic physicians. It was they who created the English Hippocrates.

This essay explores new models of the citizen–patient by attending to the post-Revolutionary blind ‘voice’. Voice, in both a literal and figurative sense, was central to the way in which members of the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, an institution for the blind and partially sighted, interacted with those in the community. Musical voices had been used by members to collect alms and to project the particular spiritual principle of their institution since its foundation in the thirteenth century. At the time of the Revolution, the Quinze-Vingts voice was understood by some political authorities as an exemplary call of humanity. Yet many others perceived it as deeply threatening. After 1800, productive dialogue between those in political control and Quinze-Vingts blind members broke down. Authorities attempted to silence the voice of members through the control of blind musicians and institutional management. The Quinze-Vingts blind continued to reassert their voices until around 1850, providing a powerful form of resistance to political control. The blind ‘voice’ ultimately recognised the right of the citizen–patient to dialogue with their political carers.

The significant contribution of medicines in the introduction and spread of ‘modern’ medicine has, with the exception of vaccination, been neglected in historical studies, yet medicines have been a significant factor in people’s experiences of sickness and in their use and non-use of health services. Although medicines are implicitly acknowledged in the literature as important in the provision of healthcare, this article uses a case study of the Mt Everest region of Nepal during the second half of the twentieth century to argue that medicines have had an explicit and central role in the introduction and spread of modern medicine in this region. It also highlights the importance of travellers in the process. While this article focuses on biomedical products, modern medicine, as elsewhere in the wider Himalayan region, continued to be practised within a changing but plural medical environment. The first part of the article discusses medicines and travellers who, in the absence of biomedical services, were the main source of medicines prior to the mid-1960s, while the second part considers medicines and Khunde Hospital, which was built in 1966 by the area’s most famous overseas traveller and became not only the area’s main provider of modern health services but also the main source of medicines.

Research councils, universities and funding agencies are increasingly asking for tools to measure the quality of research in the humanities. One of their preferred methods is a ranking of journals according to their supposed level of internationality. Our quantitative survey of seventeen major journals of medical history reveals the futility of such an approach. Most journals have a strong national character with a dominance of native language, authors and topics. The most common case is a paper written by a local author in his own language on a national subject regarding the nineteenth or twentieth century. American and British journals are taken notice of internationally but they only rarely mention articles from other history of medicine journals. Continental European journals show a more international review of literature, but are in their turn not noticed globally. Increasing specialisation and fragmentation has changed the role of general medical history journals. They run the risk of losing their function as international platforms of discourse on general and theoretical issues and major trends in historiography, to international collections of papers. Journal editors should therefore force their authors to write a more international report, and authors should be encouraged to submit papers of international interest and from a more general, transnational and methodological point of view.