If the development of medicine is to be seen to have any progressive unity which relates its past to its present and future, the focus of that study must lie with the evolution of the medical profession, the development of clinical techniques, the rise of scientific medicine and the institutions within which it is pursued and practised. All of this – the stuff of regular medical history – presupposes, silently, the existence of the very raison d' étre of medicine, the sick person. The history of the sick cannot be written in the same sequential way in which one tells the chronicle of medicine and doctors, of Falloppio being the teacher of Fabricius, who in his turn was the teacher of William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood, and ‘founded ’ modern scientific medicine. But that does not mean that it cannot, or should not, be written at all. Nor does it imply that medical patients are in some sense ‘ subhistorical ’, timeless objects merely waiting to be treated by doctors who are part of progress.

For the sick too have had their own medical culture, one with profound links to the wider consciousness of their times – religious, political, moral, aesthetic. Moreover, in important ways, the sick have not just been ‘ patients ’ but ‘agents ’ as well, both looking after their own health, and playing active roles in managing their dealings with medical professionals and the institutions of regular medicine.