Arrizabalaga, Jon (Author)
Recovering meaning from the medical and scientific lexicon of the past is always an exercise in cultural translation, and the older the text is, the more complex this task becomes. Examples are given here of some of the complexities inherent in reconstructing the meaning of medical terms that refer to human diseases of the past, with reference to the conceptual and methodological difficulties surrounding the retrospective identification of these diseases. Two historical examples are used to illustrate these difficulties: use of the label typhus in accounts of diseases written before, or in ignorance of, germ theory, and sudor Anglicus, a mysterious epidemic that struck areas bordering on the English Channel repeatedly from the end of the 15th to the mid-16th century. The former example reveals the dual aspects of cultural translation generally involved in retrospective diagnoses of disease of the past when this type of account is analyzed. The latter, on the other hand, illustrates the severe limitations implicit in this approach, and starkly illustrates the enormous variability in diagnostic labels that historians often assign to diseases of the past, as well as the marked affinity between these labels and the nosological concerns that typified medical practice at the time when these historians were active.
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