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A Diagnostic Semiotic

What if, in the year 2100, an archaeologist were to uncover, from amidst the ruins of a modern hospital, a patient's medical record? What sense might he make of this curious discovery, constructed, it would appear, by a variety of 'authors', and inscribed with an assortment of encoded signs; a document which suggested a kind of coherence, and yet was undeniably fragmented and incomplete? This question, initially occurring to me some time ago, has led me to this present attempt to delineate the domain of a diagnostic semiotic. A semiotic will here be defined as a formal investigation, by a semiotician, of any socially articulated and ostensibly purposive sign 'system', isolated for study from the other such systems with which it is 'interwoven', in order to determine the kinds, levels, interrelationships, sources, and functions of its particular constituent signs. Hence an investigation into a sign system whose ostensible purpose is the diagnosis of human 'disease' involves a description of that system's constituent diagnostic signs. But first, to paraphrase C. S. Peirce's familiar definition of the sign (Peirce 1931:2.228), a diagnostic sign will be explained as 'something' (and here the 'something' in question could include any of the following: nausea, pain, a feeling of depression, a thought, a skin lesion, an odor, a gesture or facial expression, a verbal utterance or stretch of silence, a fragment of human interaction, a blood-stain on a shirt, a photograph in a medical text book, or an image on an X-ray film) 'which stands to somebody' (in this case, to any competent witness of such a sign, whether doctor, patient, or other) 'for something' (the 'something' in this case being some conceivable state of 'health' or 'disease') and 'in some respect or capacity' (here, with