The book considers for the first time the doctor/patient relationship over a long period and from a broad geographical perspective. Historians, anthropologists and clinicians reflect on the factors that have changed the relationship of care and the power relations embedded in it from the classical era to the present. The book also highlights that communication and narrative, understood as constitutive aspects of care, are the elements that link the past to the present. From the encounter between religion and medicine to the centuries-old struggle between doctors and patients to defend their positions, from medical dramas to efforts to humanise medicine, the book describes the doctor/patient relationship in all its cultural, transnational and transstemporal dimensions.
