Jodocus Lommius's Little Golden Book and the History of Diagnostic Semeiology

This paper traces the nature and fortunes of Lommius' Medicinal Observations of 1560, its relationship to ancient authors, its two-and-a-half centuries of fame, and its fall. Originating as an accessible manual of diagnosis for municipal authorities, it emphasized the observable aspects of illness and downplayed the role of humors and hidden causes. As a result, it both heralded and served the trend to symptom-based nosology. Eventually, as disease concepts shifted from symptoms to organs, Lommius was eclipsed by the next epistemic fashion: positivistic organicism. The multiple editions of this work invite us to reconsider the sustained influence of ancient writers, including Celsus, in medical pedagogy and semeiology, as well as the timing and location of the development of nosological concepts of disease. Class considerations and the proclivities of twentieth-century scholarship contributed to the obscurity of this book in our time.