Mini Rivew Diagnosing Sin: Dante’s Inferno and Medieval Medicine
by Shely Dash*
Freshman Student at Purdue University, USA
*Corresponding author: Shely Dash, Freshman Student at Purdue University, 668 Curtis Ave, Edison, NJ, 08820 USA
Received Date: November 06, 2025
Accepted Date: November 17, 2025
Published Date: November 20, 2025
Citation: Dash S (2025) Diagnosing Sin: Dante’s Inferno and Medieval Medicine. J Med Biomed Discoveries 7: 146. https://doi.org/10.29011/2688-8718.100146
Introduction
Dante Alighieri’s Inferno is not only a story about a journey through Hell but also a compact collection of medieval knowledge. Many scholars call it a “medieval encyclopaedia” because it gathers theology, history, philosophy, politics, natural science, and medicine. Each of Dante’s cantos preserves pieces of intellectual life from his time, making the poem both a spiritual allegory and cultural record. In Inferno, Dante transforms Hell into a medical casebook, using the language and theories of medieval medicine, humoral imbalance, cauterization, and dissection, to portray sin as a disease of the soul and divine judgment as a form of spiritual diagnosis.
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