This website is designed to explore how the experience, diagnosis and treatment of illness has changed over time, and to show some of the many ways illness has been understood by humans. It is our hope that you will leave the site with a broader appreciation of the relationship of medicine to culture, and an understanding that our own medical practices look different when seen in a historical context.

In exploring this site, we ask you to think of this fundamental idea: that illness, the feeling and experience of being sick, is itself a historical object. Illness and medicine are not static(静止的) phenomena. Different people in different time periods can experience, understand and treat similar groups of symptoms very differently. Cycles of fevers and chills may be identified as being a particular disease, part of a general pattern of seasonal health or an internal struggle of opposing yet complementary forces. These are more than just descriptions; they influence the actual experience of having illness, and strongly influence the treatment. A body that is out of balance feels pain in manner that is subjectively different from a body fighting a battle against an external attacker. We believe that illness changes over time. Thus, to fully understand illness, we need not just biological explanation, but also historical explanation. We need both medicine and the history of illness.

Related to this idea is a second. This is the concept that illness, and the medical responses to illness, are related to cultural worldviews. How we see the world structures how we experience and shape the world we live in. What makes particular responses seem reasonable emerges from specific cultural values. The judgements about what medical practices are effective and sensible are value judgements made in the context of broader cultural beliefs about how the world works, our place in that world, and what is morally good and bad. Our aim is to help you understand why blood-letting for instance, now considered unacceptable, was a sensible healing activity in the early 19^th century.

Finally, it is easy to read the history of medicine as one of constant progression leading from barbaric (野蛮的) roots to a scientific approaches embodied in current medical practice. We believe that this understanding is problematic. First, a lack of knowledge that we have today did not mean that medicine in other time periods and cultures was wrong. Based on cultural values and contemporary knowledge, other cultures developed advanced treatments that were effective and sensible for their people, although they may be considered barbaric nowadays. Similarly in a century or two, our own medical practices may seem backward and nonsensical, it is not the case that former practices have led simplistically to our own superior knowledge.