Grave lessons: a guide to historiographical research in health professions education

The phrase, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is an argument for the study of history in medical education and learning lessons conveyed by past events. However, many in our health professions education (HPE) research community may not know how to approach research in this way, thus frequently excluding historical analyses in their work. In this article, we describe how HPE researchers could incorporate a basic historical analysis using a historiographical approach. Our goal is to make this research method accessible to scholars in HPE. The process is broken down into four key steps: chronicling sources, gathering and evaluating both primary and secondary sources, applying theoretical lenses to formulate an argument, and identifying the topic’s relevance to contemporary issues. The article uses the historical case of “resurrectionists,” or grave robbers, who supplied cadavers to medical schools for their anatomy labs, as a worked example to illustrate each step.