ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the historical context for the study of health and illness from a global perspective. It focuses on the social and cultural histories of medicine from the early modern period to the present. Specific themes covered in this chapter are world history and disease; medical education; and social medicine and the role of the physician-historian. The chapter also highlights methods and approaches to the history of medicine, including health encounters, medical authority, and geographies of health, and the patient’s voice. Foregrounding new and emerging scholarship in the global histories of medicine, such as biomedicine and its future; health activism; planetary health; and mental health, the chapter sets the scene for the volume with its range of themes in critical issues in health and illness, and situates these historically for the multidisciplinary reader.
