The DOI matches its Crossref record.
‘Identifying Disease in the Past: Cutting the Gordian Knot’
Open accessAbstract
How should we historians approach the issue of the identity of disease in the past?Can we legitimately identify past diseases?Can we legitimately identify past diseases with present diseases?Can we legitimately identify particular epidemics in the past?Can we legitimately talk of the evolution of diseases or pathogens?Can we legitimately reach past people's experience of disease by identifying what they were suffering from?Are our attempts at retrospective diagnosis legitimate?Is retrospective diagnosis either possible or desirable?These questions -surprisingly-virtually never crop up in the work of historians of medicine, who for the most part assume that the identification of past diseases is simply not a problem, since they assume the continuous identity of past diseases with modern diseases.They just get on with identifying past diseases in modern termswhether it is logically, philosophically or historiographically possible or not.Hence my use of the term 'legitimately' in my questions.Certainly we can make such identifications, and we do.But do they mean anything?Do they mean what we want them to mean?Are they logical, sensible, and coherent things for us to do?Most important of all, do they tell us anything at all about the past, or are they simply projections backwards of present-day issues and concerns?Before we can explore these issues we have to ask a fundamental question: what is disease?There has been a lot of confusion on this issue, based on misplaced and un-inspected assumptions.What we can say is that, at its most fundamental, disease is (1) an experience -an experience of debilitation, pain, suffering, together with (2) the spontaneous appearance of non-customary phenomena with respect to the body, such as spots, vomiting, sweating, aches, and (3) with outcomes of recovery, death or disability.In this, disease is something that humans and animals have in common.But there is one big difference.For unlike other animals, humans seem to insist on seeking reasons or causes for disease: for its incidence, its origin, its course, its outcome.Some of the reasons given in the past and in other present-day societies seem
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The cited source says what the claim attributes to it.
In the citing paper
“In England, as he demonstrates for several points over the past 400 years, the categories used for reporting causes of death differed fundamentally from those that physicians today are qualified to choose between.”
From The Question of Efficacy (2015) · cites this paper as Cunningham 2002
The cited source says what the claim attributes to it.
In the citing paper
“Looking closely at 'how diagnosis happens', Cunningham argues that 'the identity of any disease is made up of a compound of elements, of which the biological or medical is only one, and sometimes the least important'.”
From The Question of Efficacy (2015) · cites this paper as Cunningham 2002
The cited source says what the claim attributes to it.
In the citing paper
“With due attention to the social dimension, he demonstrates that human decisions regularly change disease entities.”
From The Question of Efficacy (2015) · cites this paper as Cunningham 2002
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Still being checked.
Research works printed but not linked: 1
- ---- 23 On the history of the International Classification, see (1977), International Classification of Dis- eases. Manual of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, Injuries, and Causes of Death. Based on the Recommendations of the Ninth Revision Conference, 1975, and Adopted by the Twenty- ninth World Health Assembly, Geneva, World Health Organization, Introduction. 24 «Report: Death Registrations 1999: cause England and Wales», Health Statistics Quarterly (2000), n. p. The table is five pages long, and only pages one to three are reproduced here.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Sivin, N. (2015) · Asian Medicine · doi:10.1163/15734218-12341349 · Cited by 6
Elliott, C. R. (2024) · Ethnohistory · doi:10.1215/00141801-10887971 · Cited by 1
Metadata
- Authors
- Cunningham, A.
- Affiliations
- University of Cambridge (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Cunningham, Andrew
- Venue
- Asclepio
- Publisher
- Editorial CSIC
- Published
- 2002-06-30
- Volume
- 54
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 13-34
- ISSN
- 0210-4466 (ISSN-L)
- 1988-3102
- OpenAlex
- W1507934524
- Cited by
- 70
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 6 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 3
- FWCI
- 2.22
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Locations
- Asclepio (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › History of Science and Medicine
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Archeology (arts and humanities) › Paleopathology and ancient diseases
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › History of Medicine Studies
- Keywords
- retrospective diagnosis, disease identity, epidemics, disease evolution, pathogenic microorganisms, disease definition, historiography of medicine, etiology, human-animal comparison
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: ‘Identifying Disease in the Past: Cutting the Gordian Knot’. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.3989/asclepio.2002.v54.i1.133
- The paper
- Cunningham, A. (2002). ‘Identifying Disease in the Past: Cutting the Gordian Knot’. Asclepio. https://doi.org/10.3989/asclepio.2002.v54.i1.133
