Towards a history of trust relationship between doctors and patients from the antiquity to the present

This paper aims to introduce an interdisciplinary research project conducted by a group of researchers from the University of Bologna, Milano and Roma La Sapienza. Historians, anthropologists and physicians are working together in order to examine a topic that has become crucial both to people's lives and within national health systems, that is trust among health professionals and patients. The first purpose of our research is to find out, through historiographical method and qualitative research, how trust and distrust have been emerging within the relationship of care, since Antiquity. Thus we would be able to enlighten and interpret processes that nowadays affect the doctor/patient relationship. This paper presents the very first hypothesis of this research.