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How does medical science interpret the origins of diseases in the past? Surprisingly, not so differently from today, as we saw in the recent experience of COVID-19. The French nineteenth century was characterized by two great intellectual currents, history and medicine, which both emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution. While history sought to reveal the internal logic of “interplay and laws of human revolutions,” medicine took on the task of public hygiene, social prophylaxis, and eugenics. Each discipline wrestled with the question of how to define itself as a science and each strove to triumph as the master discipline of the scientific study of the past and present. History and medicine were in competition for legitimacy and dominance of the epistemic space and political sphere. Nevertheless, they also engaged in a dialectical relationship: history taught medicine (histoire de la médecine) and medicine was a method to understand history (médecine de l’histoire). I use two instances of nineteenth-century scientific practice, the influential hereditary medicine and colonial medicine, to reveal a surprising interdependence of two presumably autonomous fields, history and medicine. I trace the competition of history and medicine in their quest for influence in matters of social and public policy and show that their interaction in such close quarters impacted both: medicine was historicized and history medicalized.