In this epilogue, Taylor-Pirie analyses the ‘heroic biography’ mode that still characterises popular histories of medicine as a legacy of the collision of science and empire at the fin de siècle. After considering the challenges inherent in writing contextual histories of science, and the human penchant for linear story-telling, she broadens her view to take into account political discourses surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic. Taylor-Pirie argues that stories of science and stories of empire shaped each other in ways that are contingent on this historical moment but that continue to inflect and occlude our self-knowledge. She contends that by paying attention to cultural encounters between medicine and the humanities in the past, we gain important insights into the relationship between science and society in the present.