Concept
Nosology
Overview
Nosology (from Ancient Greek νόσος (nosos) 'disease' and -λογία (-logia) 'study of') is the branch of medical science that deals with the classification of diseases. Fully classifying a medical condition requires knowing its cause (and that there is only one cause), the effects it has on the body, the symptoms that are produced, and other factors. For example, influenza is classified as an infectious disease because it is caused by a virus, and it is classified as a respiratory infection because the virus infects and damages certain tissues in the respiratory tract. The more that is known about the disease, the more ways the disease can be classified nosologically.
Nosography is a description whose primary purpose is enabling a diagnostic label to be put on the situation. As such, a nosographical entity need not have a single cause. For example, inability to speak due to advanced dementia and an inability to speak due to a stroke could be nosologically different but nosographically the same.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
But how often does it happen, that the complaint in question is an aggregate of symptoms, produced by peculiarities of constitution, and incidental circumstances, which, taken together, constitute an _ensemble_ which does not well admit of being referred to any one of the general forms of disease described in our nosological systems?
Hippocrates, The genuine works of Hippocrates, Vol. 1
States what Nosology is.
To him that will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and taproot, with its world-wide upas-boughs and accursed poison-exudations, under which the world lies writhing in atrophy and agony. You touch the focal-centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly…
Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII.
Names Nosology.
Etiology proper comprehends all those branches of natural science in which the chief concern is the knowledge of cause and effect. The sciences teach how, according to an invariable rule, one condition of matter is necessarily followed by a certain other condition; how one change necessarily conditions and brings about a certain other change; this sort of teaching is called _explanation_. The principal sciences in…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
States what Nosology is.
Related ideas
- Hippocrates
- Molecular biology
- Influenza
- Huangdi Neijing
- Public health
- Carl Linnaeus
- Wuxing (Chinese philosophy)
- Anatomy
- Death
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of medicine.