ABSTRACT
Medicine, and in particular the history of medical labels and taxonomies, is an intriguing area to explore for an inquiry into the nature of scientific information. Organization of data and transmission of knowledge in the field of medicine, in fact, rest importantly on the issues of definition and classification, central in the case on which I propose to focus: the construction and transmission of the ancient mental disease phrenitis, from ancient Greek testimonies through to the modern history of medicine and psychiatry. The ‘life’ of phrenitis stretches from the fifth century BCE to the nineteenth century of our era. As a rare case of a mental disease which will continue being described, diagnosed and cured by (variously defined) professionals over 24 centuries, phrenitis begs the question of its own persistence in terms of communication, as object of information. As such, I am going to consider phrenitis in this chapter: leaving aside questions of treatment and clinics, of patient perspective, of physiology and retrospective diagnosis. I shall tackle instead the following question: which elements, in the presentations of this disease by physicians, functioned as vehicle for its durability through different epistemologies and models of the body, making it, to use Berrios’ label, ‘ontologically robust’ enough to make this possible? How did the body of knowledge about phrenitis acquired through the centuries succeed in preserving and sharing such continuity across various communities and audiences?
