A history of healthcare conceived from the vantage of care, rather than that of authoritative practitioners, reveals a pattern that has been replicated over the centuries: the care that is most daily, most sustaining to all other acts, is also often the most undervalued, the most invisible and the most feminized. Recently, scholars have begun to dismantle histories of medicine that imagine the construction of health knowledge from the limited perspective of the authoritative practitioner. Their findings shatter our image of the solitary, typically white, male physician-healer, and foreground the extent to which health outcomes and health knowledge are dependent on daily acts of care.

The historian Sharon Strocchia at Emory University in Atlanta has significantly expanded the theatre of healthcare practice, as well as its dramatis personae, by demonstrating the pervasive healthcare networks established and maintained by early modern Italian nuns. Religious women, she shows, acted as ‘agents of health’ in courts, convents, and hospitals, where they developed pharmaceutical and medical technologies that were transmitted both locally and far beyond communal and political boundaries. The historian Deirdre Cooper Owens at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has revealed that the labour of enslaved women in Alabama in the 19th century created the circumstances and produced the knowledge that resulted in historic breakthroughs in gynaecological surgeries, including caesarean sections, ovariotomies and procedures for obstetric and vesicovaginal fistulas. Using their knowledge as nurses and midwives, these women performed crucial tasks in experimental surgeries, provided recovery care for patients, and supplied the bodies on which white male physicians staked their gynaecological research.

Beyond these Western models, scholars are reframing what counts as medicine and healthcare, pointing readers toward a range of therapeutic and caregiving practices that shape experiences of health, illness, and disability. The medical historian Ahmed Ragab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, for example, has outlined how traditions of prophetic medicine and religious conceptualisations of health and disease in medieval Islam conditioned both medical practice and patient response. Meanwhile, the scholar Dwaipayan Banerjee at MIT has exposed the failure of biomedical systems to recognise and relieve the suffering of impoverished cancer patients in contemporary Delhi; even when care networks are available within the household, ‘infrastructural duress’ exacerbates precarity. These studies, undertaken from the perspective of embodied experience and decentralised healthcare delivery, have provided scholars and activists with the opportunity to assert a new politics of care.

Which of the following statements can be concluded from the passage?

a Advances in medical science alone do not ensure care and healing of the sick.

b Investing in healthcare infrastructure is extremely important to combat serious diseases such as cancer.

c An individual’s experience of health is related to her experience of illness.

d Patient hood is often constructed in response to the authoritative practitioner.

e Nursing a patient back to health is the responsibility of both the family and the physician.