Epistemology, history of sciences and medical knowledge

Abstract

We aim to analyze the limits and the possibilities of an epistemological history of medicine. In the same way that there are difficulties to delimit the fields of an externalist history of science and an internalist one, thereare also difficulties to discuss the own questions of epistemological history: the exigency of recurrence, the problem of the actuality of the history ofscience or the question of the scientific knowledge as being a cumulative and progressive knowledge. We analyze the differences between that epistemological history and a social history legitimately worried in avoidingany recurrential narrative that could be characterized as Whig history inthe specific case of medical knowledge.