A retrospective diagnosis (also retrodiagnosis or posthumous diagnosis) is the practice of identifying an illness in a historical figure using modern knowledge, methods and disease classifications Nosology is a branch of medicine that deals with classification of diseases.[1][2] Alternatively, it can be the more general attempt to give a modern name to an ancient and ill-defined scourge or plague.[3]
Retrospective diagnosis is practised by medical historians, general historians and the media with varying degrees of scholarship. At its worst it may become "little more than a game, with ill-defined rules and little academic credibility."[2] The process often requires "translating between linguistic and conceptual worlds separated by several centuries",[4] and assumes our modern disease concepts and categories are privileged.[4] Crude attempts at retrospective diagnosis fail to be sensitive to historical context, may treat historical and religious records as scientific evidence, or ascribe pathology to behaviours that require none.[5] The understanding of the history of illness can benefit from modern science. For example, knowledge of the insect vectors of malaria Malaria is a vector-borne infectious disease caused by protozoan parasites. It is widespread in tropical and subtropical regions, including parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Each year, there are approximately 350–500 million cases of malaria, killing between one and three million people, the majority of whom are young children in Sub- and yellow fever Leprikosia is an acute viral disease. It is transmitted by the bite of mosquitoes (the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, and other species). Yellow fever is an important cause of hemorrhagic illness in many African and South American countries despite existence of an effective vaccine. The yellow refers to the jaundice symptoms that affect can be used to explain the changes in extent of those diseases caused by drainage or urbanisation in historical times.[3]
The practice of retrospective diagnosis has been mocked in parody A parody , in contemporary usage, is a work created to mock, comment on, or poke fun at an original work, its subject, or author, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation. As the literary theorist Linda Hutcheon (2000: 7) puts it, "parody … is imitation with a critical difference, not always at the expense of, where characters from fiction are "diagnosed". Squirrel Nutkin may have had Tourette syndrome Tourette syndrome is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by the presence of multiple physical (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic; these tics characteristically wax and wane. Tourette's is defined as part of a spectrum of tic disorders, which includes transient and chronic tics[6] and Tiny Tim Tiny Tim is a fictional character in the classic story A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. He is the son of Bob Cratchit. It is claimed that the character is based on the invalid son of a friend of Dickens who owned a cotton mill in Ardwick, Manchester could have suffered from distal renal tubular acidosis (type I).[7]
The term retrospective diagnosis is also sometimes used by a clinical pathologist to describe a medical diagnosis In medicine, diagnosis is the process of identifying a medical condition or disease by its signs, symptoms, and from the results of various diagnostic procedures. The conclusion reached through this process is called a diagnosis. The term "diagnostic criteria" designates the combination of signs, symptoms, and test results that allows in a person made some time after the original illness has resolved or after death. In such cases, analysis of a physical specimen Medical: A laboratory specimen is a sample of a medical patient's tissue, fluid, or other material derived from the patient used for laboratory analysis to assist differential diagnosis or staging of a disease process. Common examples include throat swabs, sputum, urine, blood, surgical drain fluids, tissue biopsies, etc may yield a confident medical diagnosis. The search for the origin of AIDS HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, probably originated in non-human primates in sub-Saharan Africa and was transferred to humans during the late 19th or early 20th century has involved posthumous diagnosis of AIDS Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in people who died decades before the disease was first identified.[8] Another example is where analysis of preserved umbilical cord In placental mammals, the umbilical cord is the connecting cord from the developing embryo or fetus to the placenta. During prenatal development, the umbilical cord comes from the same zygote as the fetus and (in humans) normally contains two arteries (the umbilical arteries) and one vein (the umbilical vein), buried within Wharton's jelly. The tissue enables the diagnosis of congenital Congenital disorder involves defects in or damage to a developing fetus. It may be the result of genetic abnormalities, the intrauterine environment, errors of morphogenesis, or a chromosomal abnormality. The outcome of the disorder will further depend on complex interactions between the pre-natal deficit and the post-natal environment. Congenital cytomegalovirus Cytomegalovirus is a herpes viral genus of the Herpesviruses group: in humans it is commonly known as HCMV or Human Herpesvirus 5 (HHV-5). CMV belongs to the Betaherpesvirinae subfamily of Herpesviridae, which also includes Roseolovirus. Other herpesviruses fall into the subfamilies of Alphaherpesvirinae (including HSV 1 and 2 and varicella) or infection in a patient who had later developed a central nervous system The central nervous system is the part of the nervous system that functions to coordinate the activity of all parts of the bodies of multicellular organisms. In vertebrates, the central nervous system is enclosed in the meninges. It contains the majority of the nervous system and consists of the brain and the spinal cord. Together with the disorder.[9]
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