...the list relies on discontinuity rather than continuity; it depends on physical placement, on location...most importantly it encourages the ordering of the items, by number, by initial sound, by vategory, etc. and the existence of boundaries, external and internal, brings greater visibility to categories, at the same time as making them more abstract.

jack goody, the domestication of the savage society.


what these lists are listing are not things. they are instead the result of a number of subjective decisions about what objective symptoms shall be selected as significant, and how they shall be combined into syndromes. in the absence of any clear objective correlative which could serve as an unambiguous referent, it would be difficult to give fixity to such decisions - particularly when the new disease entity has no distinct name of its own. the advantage of writing is so obvious here that it may well have suggested the whole enterprise.

iain lonie, the hippocratic treatises: a commentary.