What is lost if we don’t have a diagnosis? This article examines the aims of clinical medicine and the role of understanding in these aims. Starting from a case prompt with a patient suffering from persistent physical symptoms, I argue that understanding is at the clinical core and that the target of such understanding is the patient’s body with symptoms.

Synthesizing accounts of medical understanding and phenomenology of illness, I suggest that the understanding sought in the clinic extends beyond mechanistic explanation to include a sense of bodily intelligibility and that diagnoses are useful but not necessary tools to this end.