The physician as teacher. Epistemic function, cognitive function and the incommensurability of errors.

Abstract

In many Hippocratic writings, the writers' attention is often focused on registering and discussing medical errors. Far from being sporadic and fortuitous, these discussions represent a privileged rhetorical resource in order to produce different effects. The aims of my paper will be: 1) to determine some of the most important contexts in which errors become the object of medical discourse; 2) to distinguish, per exempla, the typologies of errors made object of discourse; 3) to give an epistemological outline which may clarify which functions these discourses have and whether these functions respond coherently to a conscious plan of medical knowledge.