nosography

Nosography is the branch of medical science concerned with the description, naming, and systematic documentation of diseases. The term, from Greek nosos (“disease”) and graphein (“to write”), denotes the descriptive record of disease manifestations, including signs, symptoms, lesions, and typical clinical courses, as well as the anatomical and etiological aspects that help to identify them. In practice, nosography overlaps with nosology and disease nomenclature, but it is often distinguished by its emphasis on the descriptive cataloging of individual diseases and their diagnostic criteria rather than on the abstract classification scheme itself.

Historically, nosographies appeared in ancient, medieval, and early modern medical writings as compendia of disease descriptions used for diagnosis and teaching. They collected characteristic features of diseases, illustrated how conditions presented across patients, and sometimes noted geographic or cultural variations in naming. With the rise of formal nosology, classification systems and standardized codes, the role of nosography as a separate discipline diminished, though the descriptive approach remains foundational to clinical description and case reporting.

In modern times, the term is encountered primarily in historical, philological, or anthropological discussions of medicine. Nosography continues to inform the study of how diseases were perceived and named in different cultures, and it informs the historical analysis of diagnostic criteria. While not widely used as a distinct scientific field today, its core function—to document disease manifestations in a structured way—persists in clinical descriptors, medical dictionaries, and epidemiological catalogs.