Introduction

The prevention and treatment of disease is one of the oldest recognizable ‘practical disciplines’, and among the first to be recorded in documents. Healthcare has always been in the lead in adopting new technologies and media for recording and disseminating information. Considering the history of healthcare and the kinds of recorded information which have been created to support it at various times gives us an essential perspective on the situation today, without which it is not possible to adequately understand how and why healthcare information is as it is. This is the justification for focusing on the historical aspect of domain analysis in this chapter.

The history of the healthcare professions (medicine in particular) and of the scientific research which has contributed to the field is an academic subject in itself, with an extensive literature. Here, we can only attempt an outline view, drawing mainly from a few leading monographs of the subject (Porter 1996, 1997; Bynum, Hardy, Jacyna, Lawrence and Tansey, 2006; Conrad, Neve, Nutton, Porter and Wear, 1995), all of which provide copious further reading for those interested; for a shorter and more popular survey, see Strathern (2005). In view of the main purpose of this book, we will mainly focus on the Western style and tradition of healthcare; for an account of the history of other traditional medical and healthcare approaches, for example those of China and India, see Porter (1997). We will take a chronological approach, focusing only on those aspects which have had a direct influence on the communication of healthcare information. To a large extent, this means focusing on the history of medicine, the other healthcare professions, in an information context, having appeared only relatively recently.

The ancient world

Presumably some attempts were made to treat injury and disease in the earliest human communities, but of this we have no record. The first written records of what we can regard as organized healthcare are found in the earliest known civilization of the Bronze Age, along with the establishment of large settlements, the cultivation of crops, sophisticated metal working and the organization of time and space through calendars and maps. With these, of course, came the development of scripts and writing, and hence administration and bureaucracy.