Conclusion
Throughout this paper, I have used the phrase ‘history in health’ to denote a particular way history research and practice could be used within a health promotion settings approach. I have highlighted the arguments around history's social role and why this can contribute to a health promotion agenda. The past cannot be changed, but we can change the way we understand that past and the way we use the investigations and products of enquiries into the past. As health promotion researchers and practitioners, we need to be working in partnership with a wide range of disciplines as part of multi-strategic and multi-sectoral interventions to address social determinants of health. History has been underutilised in this venture. I have outlined a number of reasons why and how history and historians can be more readily brought into the health promotion fold: as experts in analysing deep sociopolitical contexts, including structures and processes that exclude; as tellers of stories that can shift the social narrative towards well-being; as myth-busters that can help the silenced find their voice; as contributors to raising social consciousness. I have also suggested projects such as community oral histories that can provide avenues of community participation and engagement that can work towards a more inclusive community. As such, I urge health promotion researchers and practitioners to build partnerships with their local historians and museums, although I add two cautions: 1) to be aware of different views amongst historians regarding the social role of history; and 2) to recognise many historians who may not be aware of the health impacts of their own work, and thus may need to be coached around health promotion interventions and the ethics of working in communities. I add these cautions, not to be critical of historians, but to alert health promotion researchers and practitioners to a possible naivety about health promotion work within some historians. There has not been sufficient dialogue between the two disciplines over time for each to fully understand the other or how each can make the most of the skills and knowledge of the other. As a historian and health researcher, I trust this will change and that health promotion practitioners and researchers will come to see local historians as a valued partner in healthy settings approaches and that the role history can play in healthy settings will become more overt.
