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Social History of Medicine 2000 13(2):265-278; doi:10.1093/shm/13.2.265
© 2000 by Society for the Social History of Medicine
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Signs and Senses: Diagnosis and Prognosis in Early Medieval Pulse and Urine Texts

FAITH WALLIS*

* Department of History, McGill University Stephen Leacock Building, 855 Sherbrooke Street W., Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2T7

The character of early medieval medical manuscripts makes it difficult to generalize about the nature of medical knowledge in this period. In order to reconstitute one field of medical science, namely diagnosis and prognosis, while avoiding the pitfalls of unjustified generalization, this essay limits itself to reconstructing the understanding of pulse and urine inspection available in a particular place and time: the Italian monastery of Monte Cassino at the end of the first millennium. The available texts reveal little about the rationale behind these bedside techniques; indeed, pulse and urine seem to be signs without any semiotics, any underlying theory. The clue to this paradox is the fact that these texts see pulse and urine as primarily prognostic rather than diagnostic. Prognosis was understood to be analogous to forms of intuition, judgement, revelation, and prophecy that operated outside the logic of causality. Hence a fully rationalized semiotics was not regarded as necessary for effective medical practice.

Keywords: diagnosis; prognosis; pulse; uroscopy; Monte Cassino MS. 97; Monte Cassino MS. 69; Alexander (of Tralles?); Hermogenes; prophecy; religion


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