ABSTRACT
From the medical matrix we face both the brightest and the darkest side of life. Here technology’s peaks are dramatically associated with deep knowledge of nature’s prodigies. The peculiar human disposition of taking health for granted makes evident the degree in which we equate it to life itself. We try to do without doctors until a disease seizes our body or threatens our life. For that reason the symbol of the medical matrix is not health, but disease only referring to health by its absence. Disease as symbol of this matrix is not, in this case, an object for latching-on but of being latched-by, not for being captivated but held captive by an illness (except for doctors who play agon with it). It operates as symbol by the inevitable affective, material and time loads dedicated to fight or to prevent it. It is not casual that semeiotics, as theory of signs, emerged in classical Greece precisely from this matrix, because the body appears to speak a language of symptoms whose understanding and decodification is a matter of life and death.
