Thomas Browne's A Letter to a Friend and the semiotics of disease

In its opening pages, Thomas Browne's Letter to a Friend (published posthumously, 1690) declares the physician's instant certainty about the fatal prognosis of a consumptive patient for the benefit of a mutual friend who has asked Browne for a report. If Browne aims to come across as an authoritative physician – and he does – this authority proves a far more complex semiotic affair than his immediate recognition of a fatal consumption. A Letter to a Friend epitomizes how, for Browne, the truly authoritative physician moves beyond the diagnosis of an obvious consumption and its fatal consequences to a heroic wrestling match with the endlessly varied circumstances in which disease was experienced, interpreted, and applied to future lives. Browne's essential point in Letter to A Friend is that even with the most commonplace of diseases and the most certain of prognoses, the true physician faces a swarm of interpretive problems in the service of a wide range of religious, moral, as well as medical roles in a closely knit and intensely felt social context

Aesthetics · Certainty · Consumption (sociology · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Semiotics · History · History of Medicine Studies · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology