I became interested in this topic because antibiotics are both familiar and complicated. In China, antibiotics are often described as “消炎药,” a phrase that connects them to everyday ideas of inflammation, fever, wounds, coughs, and quick recovery. They are medicines that many people have used, trusted, or kept at home, but they are also connected to one of the most serious public health challenges today: antimicrobial resistance.
This question became more personal through my grandmother’s experience. Born in 1958, she lived through a period of major change in China’s healthcare system and later worked as both a barefoot doctor and a trained doctor. Her memories reveal how antibiotics were understood not only by medical workers, but also by ordinary people who saw them as the strongest treatments.
By looking at China’s antibiotic history, barefoot doctors, family experiences, generational perspectives, and global AMR data, I wanted to understand how antibiotics became trusted everyday medicines and why this creates ethical dilemmas today.
Why are antibiotics in China so often understood as anti-inflammatory medicines or powerful everyday treatments?
This project explores how this understanding was shaped by history, medicine, and everyday life from penicillin’s arrival as a symbol of modern science and national rescue, to barefoot doctors bringing antibiotics into rural China, and later to pharmacies, healthcare marketisation, and family self-medication.
It also asks a wider ethical question of how we can reduce unnecessary antibiotic use while still protecting access for those who truly need these medicines as antimicrobial resistance becomes a global public health crisis.
Antibiotics are part of many people’s everyday experiences of illness, treatment, and recovery. They appear in hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, family medicine cabinets, and personal memories.
This website explores how antibiotics became more than just medical substances. It looks at their history in China, their cultural meaning as “anti-inflammatory pill,” their role across different generations, and their connection to the global problem of antimicrobial resistance.
Through historical timelines, personal stories, data mapping, ethical analysis, and visual storytelling, this project asks how the way we understand antibiotics shapes the way we use them and why that matters for the future.