The history of public health is the history of human being's continuous understanding of health and disease as a group. The study of medical social history evokes people's ideological resonance of respecting life and caring for patients, and inspires people to cut through difficulties on the road of exploring the mysteries of life and disease. With the continuous development of COVID-19 epidemic in the world, medical and health problems have played an increasingly prominent role in the historical process. At present, medical social history has been widely concerned by academic circles and has become an important academic field.

Medical social history is an interdisciplinary subject developed with the development of science and the progress of medicine. The definition and connotation of medical history change with the continuous progress of medicine, and its research field is becoming wider and wider, including not only the history of various medical disciplines, but also the influence and shaping of human health care activities on society.

According to Yu Xinzhong, dean of the School of History of Nankai University, the formulation of "medical social history" actually appeared relatively late, and the early research was generally called medical history. In the west, medical history has been paid attention to by academic circles as early as17th century. In China, the study of modern medical history began in the early 20th century. The early research on medical history in China was mainly undertaken by medical scholars.

Since the second half of the 20th century, more and more researchers of humanities and social sciences such as history and sociology have entered this field. Since the end of the 20th century, influenced by the realistic needs and the western academic circles, the research on health, disease and medical treatment has become increasingly rich in domestic historians, and the social history of medical treatment has also become a new field of academic concern.

China's medical social history is a tributary of China's cultural history. The medical history books of past dynasties recorded the epidemic situation of diseases and important medical documents at that time. Yu Gengzhe, a professor at the School of History and Culture of Shaanxi Normal University, said that the ancients attached great importance to the interaction between medicine and society. Huangfu Mi's Preface to Acupuncture and Moxibustion A and B in the Western Jin Dynasty, Zhang Gao's Theory of Medicine in the Song Dynasty and Leo Lee's History of Medicine in the Ming Dynasty are all his representative works.

Chen Bangxian's History of Chinese Medicine is the first academic representative work on the social history of modern medicine, and it is also the first work on the general history of medicine, which involves all fields of medicine and health and is characterized by systematic chronicles. Followed by Wang Jimin and Lian Dewu's History of Chinese Medicine, Xie Guan's Origin of Traditional Chinese Medicine, several related articles of Chen Yuan's early years (later co-edited as Chen Yuan's early anthology), Li Tao's Outline of Medical History, etc.