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‘Identifying Disease in the Past: Cutting the Gordian Knot’
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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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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- ---- 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.
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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
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