"Historian" is a term used by medical professionals (particularly physicians and nurses) to describe a narrator of a medical history.
Medical history is usually divided into surgical history (all prior surgeries), social history (sexual, recreational, and alcohol/drug factors), family history (heritable diseases and conditions and their presence in family members), and health or personal health history (the subject's prior illnesses, together with their treatments and outcomes). A patient's ability to "give a good history," that is to accurately recall and describe the details of relevant background, is essential in the treatment of an illness.
This term has nothing to do with the subject of History per se and derives instead form the ancient Greek meaning of "history" as "narrative." Patients who are "poor historians" will often require the intervention of family members or care givers to provide the missing pieces of history. Patients who mislead physicians about their histories, either consciously or unconsciously, can greatly aggravate the process of diagnosis and delay treatment by requiring the physician to obtain all past medical records.
Famous quotes containing the word historian:
“It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Portland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.”
—For the State of New Hampshire, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)