Could the urine flask diagnose disease?
Positions
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The flask as the physician's central test
From Theophilus in the seventh century, through Isaac Israeli, Actuarius and Gilles de Corbeil's teaching verse, urine was read as a product of the digestion of the blood. By the 14th century uroscopy was integral to judging a patient's humoral balance, the basis of diagnosis and treatment, and it served prognosis as well.
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Critics: no disease from urine alone
Doubt ran alongside the practice. Isaac warned against prophecy without seeing the patient; Salernitan verses told physicians to look at everything in the urine without believing they could see everything in it; Petrarch mocked physicians bent over chamber pots; Forestus (1589) attacked the uromancers; Cotta (1612), Brian (1637) and Primrose (1651) followed. Brian's case was that urine alone gives no certain knowledge of any disease, and that practitioners filled the gap by questioning the messenger.
Sources- Harvey, Troubled Waters (Public Domain Review) Secondary
- corpus.nz: How to be a pisse-prophet Secondary
- Brian, The Pisse-Prophet (London, 1637), archive.org scan Primary
- Hagströmer Library catalogue title for Petrus Forestus, De incerto, fallaci urinarum iudicio, Leiden, Plantin, 1589 (seen in a search result) Museum or society
Evidence
Brian's own confession, and a story of the physician Guillaume Boucher (died 1410), who found stomach trouble in a man from a sample that turned out to be a woman's, show how readings could be staged or simply wrong. William the Englishman's De urina non visa (1220) even taught how to judge a patient by the sky when no urine was available. Learned physicians had largely given up the method by the early 17th century, but patients kept asking for it.
Current standing
Settled against uroscopy as a stand-alone diagnostic. Chemical analysis of urine replaced it from the early 19th century. The film's verdict is that the flask was not wrong to be looked at; it had been looked at wrongly.