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Richard C. Keller, Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 70, Issue 4, October 2015, Pages 667–669, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrv021
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If we have science, do we really need history? Or perhaps to put the question another way, do historians need to draw on molecular biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics to validate their craft? Steven Pinker certainly seems to think so, arguing that stratigraphy and other scientific borrowings have converted archaeology from “a branch of art history to a high-tech science,” with a concomitant “explanatory depth” (The New Republic, 6 August 2013). Talk to a scientist about collaborations between the humanities and the bench sciences, and any enthusiasm is about the possibility of saving the humanities through science, rather than how the sciences might learn something from the humanities. So the study of the Black Death now involves sequencing microbial DNA extracted from the teeth of its victims to determine whether it really was Yersinia pestis that killed all those people, rather than exploring texts and other evidence about meaning within the past: lots of work here for microbiologists, but none, apparently, for historians, except perhaps as consultants.