For example I was watching a documentary about Japanese warlords and it said that one of them died from liver cancer. How could they know that?
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Ancient medicine may not be perfect, but it was not completely off either. They were certainly able to recognize signs and symptoms of patients, and make certain diagnoses. They may not have been able to cure cancer, or know exactly how cancer affected the body, but could identify it. Through observation, they could tell how a bad liver made a person sick. When dissecting a body, some older doctor might have made a note about how the liver looked weird or diseased.
An historian might look at old medical records, and might notice that many people died of something called bile fever (I am making this word up just for this example). They look at medical books and the symptoms for bile fever are very similar to liver cancer. They track this word bile fever over many year of medical books, and eventually they might find a modern source saying something like, “we diagnosed this person with liver cancer, or as the locals call it, bile fever.” The similarities between the description of the disease to liver cancer, and the connect to liver cancer with an older term often found in the records allows historians to come up with a modern diagnosis of ancient diseases.
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