Spatial Relevance: Teaching History to Medical Students at a Medical Museum in Hong Kong

This article examines the pedagogical significance of history workshops as part of the mandatory medical curriculum in Hong Kong. At the University of Hong Kong, year one medical students must take a three-hour long history workshop at the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences. We argue that by immersing experiential museum learning into the official medical curriculum, students can grow interest in Hong Kong's local medical history and discover its spatial relevance to their future practice. Moreover, students are equipped with analytical skills to tackle important agendas, such as historical contingency, multicausality of diseases, and perspectivism in dealing with conflicting narratives. However, we also notice that the way histories are curated in the museum and through the heritage trail could potentially constrain students to develop a limited historiography. The museum exhibitions and the trail walk mostly curated by medical professionals emphasize too much of the comparison of the bubonic plague and SARS that took place in 1894 and 2003. Students might assume the linear progression of medical sciences and the oversimplified dichotomy between traditional and modern medicine. In addition, disproportionate narratives of infectious and non-infectious disease in Hong Kong might result in oversight of the chronicity of general ill health conditions that have long been suffered by local people. Workshop conveners, therefore, need to constantly modify discussion questions to balance demands between the advancement of contemporary medicine emphasized in medical education and the critical thinking process offered by history.