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Editorial
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To a neurologist, sensory history means documenting the duration and distribution of numbness and pins and needles and supplementing the story with several hours painstaking quantification of light touch using von Frey hairs; but for historians, sensory history is an emerging discipline based on the premise that human perception is much conditioned by the contexts and social values of the times in which the events of interest actually occurred. These formulations raise the usual canard of ‘what is medical history?’ Physicians interested in the history of their subject are usually caricatured as imposing the knowledge and constraints of their own times on the historical record; historians are dubbed with being too little concerned with fact and physiology, merely seeing how things work as a function of the cultural perspectives of previous ages. It follows that—for sensory historians—sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell are not archetypal physiological systems made up of
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