Anthropologists used to spend years immersing themselves in the life of small foreign communities in order to bridge the unbridgeable cultural gulf that existed between themselves and the people they studied. What they did with that transfer of cognition lay usually along a spectrum represented at one end by the persona of the naïve observer who tries to retell to the home audience what the alien society is like, and at the other by the theoretician who draws upon the material he or she has collected to reconstruct social structures. Influencing all the points along the spectrum are the present-day concerns and interests of the anthropologist's own society.

Like the ‘naïve’ observer I have tried to recreate the knowledge and practice of that foreign culture: early modern medicine. The subject has been strangely neglected whilst the new discipline of the social history of medicine has been redrawing and enriching our understanding of early modern medicine. Old Whiggish notions of concentrating solely upon what appears to be ‘rational’ and progressive in a modern sense have been abandoned, as has the emphasis on elite professional groups. Instead, demographic studies have uncovered the facts of life and death for the population, the experiences of patients, the poor and women have emerged to the foreground, and the wider cultural and political contexts to medicine have been explored.