Problematizing retrospective diagnosis in the history of disease

The perception of biomedical achievements in the last century has led most Westerners and those in the rest of the world under the influence of Western scientific culture, to assume that their own representations of disease and of its causes are the most authentic, the truest, on the assumption that such representations are the culmination of an historical process through which modern medical science gradually achieved a better understanding of these phenomena -in accordance with a mathematical image, so esteemed by Popperian philosophers of science, of scientific knowledge as asymptotic to natural reality.