This state-of-the-art monograph offers a comprehensive model of medicine based on language in which health and illness are presented as a matter of self-description or autobiography, and contains a philosophy of medicine based on the general theory of signs. Includes a sketch of the history of medicine in terms of how medicine has conceptualized signs and symptoms over the centuries; formulates a semiotic view of the symptom, drawing on theories of Peirce, Buhler, Freud, and Greimas; introduces a semiotic medical model; and develops a logic of life based on modern views of cosmology and evolution. Volume VII in the Sources in Semiotics series.