Bodies of knowledge: historians, health and education

There are multiple vantage points from which historians have observed the ways in which both diseased and healthy bodies (as well as their constituent parts) have served as tools of knowledge generation, instruction and coercion in the hands of medical practitioners. From spaces of formal, specialist education such as the medical school to more informal environments and modes of learning, there is a seemingly never-ending array of environments, actors and materials to consider when trying to construct a representative survey of the two fields. Focusing primarily on the British case, this article takes a selective view of the different kinds of environments, actors and approaches historians have used to understand pedagogies of health and medicine in the modern period before suggesting new avenues of potential inquiry.