Ideas of health and illness are woven into the roots of what it is to be human. Health links traditional and modern modes of knowledge, embodying in a single conceptual space the long evolutionary continuity of our physical and social selves. Health is perhaps the first and most fruitful of humanity's attempts to extend technological mastery over a frightening and unpredictable Nature. Health endows art with one of its most hard-working metaphorical frameworks, conveyancing frailty of flesh and strength of spirit into grand human narratives of conflict and redemption.

From the earliest societies, health has forged a pathway between intuitive obeisance to the supernatural and a growing sense of the possibility of human agency – mediating our atavistic attachment to ritual with a modernising confidence in scientific method, integrating the magical and the empirical as overlapping modes of inquiry – recognising, in our search for truth, the evidentiary weaknesses of the former and the explanatory limits of the latter.

Between 3000 and 200 BCE, there was an extraordinary flourishing of inquiry into the conditions of illness and codification of cause (Sahlas, 2001). Egyptian papyri of the Old Kingdom reveal an increasingly sophisticated system of medicine manifesting detailed analysis of the major infectious diseases, along with advanced understanding of reproductive and gynaecological disorders and the development of remarkable anatomical and surgical skills. Practical medical concerns, though, merge with questions of deeper social value.

Interest in ophthalmic knowledge, while helpful in addressing common disorders like trachoma, probably speaks to an Egyptian preoccupation with the eye as principal conduit between the worlds of the living and the dead (Andersen, 1997). Intense interest in embryology, from Buddhist and Ayurvedic texts to Aristotle's epigenetics points, doubtless, to the concern for successful procreation, but also to profounder questions raised by fertility – of the ethical origins of life, the nature of the soul, and the critical patriarchal project of codifying male and female reproductive (and thence social) roles (Wellner, 2010).

As civilisations evolve, health forms a bridge between richly imaginative spiritual worlds and the world of bodily necessity – the idea of health and survival as a matter of divine decision gradually supplanted by a nascent sense of humanity's capacity to engineer its own fate.