Problematizing retrospective diagnosis in the history of disease

Abstract

The perception of biomedical achievements in the last century has led most Westerners and those in the rest of the world under the influence of Western scientific culture, to assume that their own representations of disease and of its causes are the most authentic, the «truest», on the assumption that such representations are the culmination of an historical process through which modern medical science gradually achieved a better understanding of these phenomena -in accordance with a mathematical image, so esteemed by Popperian philosophers of science, of scientific knowledge as asymptotic to natural reality.Until well into the 1920s this idea was indisputable among historians of disease not least as a result of the «disciplinary» and, above all, legitimizing role with respect to modern medicine that History of Medicine had played after its institutionalization in German and Central European medical faculties during the late nineteenth century.The great impact that new laboratory medicine was having from the mid nineteenth century on the re-conceptualization of diseases had meant that the history of human diseases was reconstructed as a process of acquisition of knowledge and techniques leading to the present time in a linear, progressive and inexorable way.From the late nineteenth-century, the laboratory was presented in the historico-medical studies as the scenario where, definitively, medicine had succeeded in endowing itself with a method -the systematical resort to experimental research-reliable and rigorous, to ----

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