Semiotics, the study of signs, belonged to medicine before it passed to linguists.

AI and algorithms can map a finding to a disease but ignore what the finding means for the patient.

Semiotics offers medicine a framework for understanding the context of data.

By Prav Prathapan, Senior Medical Writer, Encephalitis International.

A year after herpes simplex encephalitis, a woman returns for her follow-up MRI. The scan is thankfully clean. The report says no evidence of active disease, and it’s correct.

Yet her husband, sitting beside her, says she has not come back the same person.

Only one of these findings gets to be recorded, and determines what happens next. The other one leaves the room with them.

This is not a failure of scanning. It is a failure of reading, and medicine used to have a discipline for it.

Long before ‘semiotics’ belonged to linguists and literary theorists, it belonged to physicians.

The word comes from the Greek sēmeion, ‘sign’, and medical semiotics was the medical speciality of reading the body (1); of interpreting the signs and symptoms through which a disease presents itself.

The roots of medical semiotics extend to Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BCE), whose treatises on prognosis taught physicians to gather signs (the colour of the skin, the features of the breath, the pattern........

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