Summary

Diagnosis is the complex process of recognising and explaining a patient's symptoms and diseases, which combines assumptions about scientific knowledge, cultural understandings of the body, and social interaction between doctors and patients. Across the ancient world, a number of different approaches to diagnosis emerged. Most famously, within the Hippocratic Corpus a naturalistic understanding of illness was championed, which promoted close observation of both symptoms and contextual data to differentiate between various diseases and explain their origins. Later periods saw the emergence of new techniques for examining the body, especially the examination of the pulse and urine. These were themselves predicated on increasingly precise understandings of human anatomy. Simultaneously, different medical approaches—promoted by Empiricists and Methodists—adopted distinct approaches to both the causal explanation of diseases as well as the process of examining the symptoms and signs of disease, which underpinned different practices of diagnosis.