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Article ID: CBB001202410

Sauvages’ Paperwork: How Disease Classification Arose from Scholarly Note-Taking (2014)

Hess, Volker (Author)
Mendelsohn, J. Andrew (Author)

Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period
Volume: 19
Pages: 471-503

DOI: 10.1163/15733823-00195p05

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Nosology; classification of diseases Humanism Classification Notebooks Disease and diseases Methodology of science; scientific method Empiricism 18th century

What was classification as it first took modern form in the eighteenth century, and how did it relate to earlier ways of describing and ordering? We offer new answers to these questions by examining medicine rather than botany and by reconstructing practice on paper. First among disease classifications was the ‘nosology’ of the Montpellier physician François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix. Analysis of his hitherto unstudied notebooks and of the nosology’s many editions (1731-1772) shows that Boissier de Sauvages broke with earlier physicians’ humanistic ordering of disease while sustaining the paper practices they had used. Scientific method was scholarly method. Classification arose through an incomplete break with, and intensified practice of, a past library-based way of ordering the described world. A new empiricism of generalizations (species) arose out of an older one of particulars (observationes). This happened through the rewriting – not the replacement – of the canon of disease knowledge since antiquity and its reordering on the printed page.

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