“Retro-Diagnosis”

Sam Kean discusses diagnosis after death – and some of the thorny issues that surround it:

I believe we can diagnose some people from the past. But our stumbling around in people’s genes could well look naïve someday, the way that ancient theories about black bile, phlegm, and other "humours" look quaint to us. As historian Axel Karenberg—author of the paper "Next Emperor, Please! No End to Retrospective Diagnostics"—told me, once doctors discover a new disease or condition, you can be fairly sure that, within about a decade, some historical celebrity will be diagnosed with it. In fact, Karenberg says, the history of retrodiagnoses closely parallels the history of medicine itself. It can thus reveal less about the past than the present.