A brief history of communication in healthcare

This chapter provides a brief history of how communication developed within the context of healthcare provision. The chapter describes this history by referring to how the problem of human disease has been approached over time, and how this reshaped the ways we have communicated about care. We start our account at the time when care began to be institutionalised by people with increasing specialist training and with rising levels of financial and governmental support. First, then, we discuss the lead up to the emergence of Western healthcare institutions. Caring for the sick was common throughout the ages, of course, with different cultures developing their own unique ways of caring for the unwell (Porter, 1999). For centuries, religious orders had specialised wards attached to monasteries where male nurses specialised in looking after the diseased. The Middle Ages saw the rise of charitable guesthouses and alms houses where people suffering from a wide variety of afflictions were admitted and nursed (Risse, 1999). These early nursing practices were gradually complemented with medical approaches to disease treatment. Medicine emerged during the Renaissance from a fusion of two different fields. One was the practice of dissecting corpses, already evident in Greek times, and then only intermittently allowed under later Christian regimes. The other was the practice of drug administration, combining sophisticated folk knowledge of herbal treatments with pharmacological experimentation and clinical observation.