This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Nosology is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
Nosology (from the Greek νόσος, nosos, "disease" + λόγος "logos") is a branch of medicine that deals with classification of diseases.
Diseases may be classified by etiology (cause), pathogenesis (mechanism by which the disease is caused), or by symptom(s). Alternatively, diseases may be classified according to the organ system involved, though this is often complicated since many diseases affect more than one organ.
A chief difficulty in nosology is that diseases often cannot be defined and classified clearly, especially when etiology or pathogenesis are unknown. Thus diagnostic terms often only reflect a symptom or set of symptoms (syndrome).
One of the earliest efforts at developing a classification of diseases began in the 10th century, when the Arabian psychologist Najab ud-din Unhammad classified a nosology of nine major categories of mental disorders, which included 30 different mental illnesses in total. Some of the categories he described included obsessive-compulsive disorders, delusional disorders, degenerative diseases, involutional melancholia, and states of abnormal excitement.[1]
In the 18th century, the taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus, Francois Boissier de Sauvages, and psychiatrist Phillipe Pinel developed an early classification of physical illnesses. Thomas Sydenham's work in the late 17th century might also be considered a nosology. In the 19th century, Emil Kraepelin and then Jacques Bertillon developed their own nosologies. Bertillon's work, classifying causes of death, was a precursor of the modern medical-billing code system, ICD.
The early nosological efforts grouped diseases by their symptoms, whereas modern systems (e.g. SNOMED) focus on grouping diseases by the anatomy and etiology involved.
See also
- Differential diagnosis
- International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems
- Medical classification
- Pathology (study of disease)
- Category:Diseases (Wikipedia's categorization of diseases)
References
- ^ Millon, Theodore (2004), Masters of the Mind: Exploring the Story of Mental Illness from Ancient Times to the New Millennium, John Wiley & Sons, p. 38, ISBN 0471679615
External links
- Gordon L. Snider, Nosology for Our Day Its Application to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine Vol 167. pp. 678-683, (2003). fulltext
 |
This medical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 5 July 2008, at 00:56.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Nosology".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.