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So often nowadays one hears people say He was diagnosed with walliballi disease.

Is this grammatically correct? What does a doctor diagnose? My own instinct, supported by the OED is that a doctor diagnoses an illness, or a medical condition - he/she does not diagnose a person.

The OED definition* of the verb, with examples is:

a. trans. To make a diagnosis of (a disease), to distinguish and determine its nature from its symptoms; to recognize and identify by careful observation.

1861 A. Wynter Our Social Bees 339, I was enabled to diagnose the complaint at once.

1877 F. T. Roberts Handbk. Med. (ed. 3) I. 231 Articular rheumatism has also to be diagnosed from the other forms.

1887 Homeop. World 1 Nov. 497, I diagnosed chronic jaundice.

So can it be correct to say He was diagnosed with...?

Would it not be more correct to say:

He was found by diagnosis to have.....

Or what would be an alternative way of saying the same thing?

*It would be less than honest not to include the caveat in the most recent edition of OED: 'This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1895)' (Contributed by Edwin Ashworth)

Had the OP been aware of such caveat he would naturally have included it. It does not appear in the current online edition. And whilst on the subject of 'honesty', have the editors of this post ever actually seen such a caveat in print? (OP's response).

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OLD lists the following usages with the verb diagnose:

  • to say exactly what an illness or the cause of a problem is:

Usages:

  • diagnose (something) The test is used to diagnose a variety of diseases.
  • diagnose something as something The illness was diagnosed as cancer.
  • diagnose somebody with something He has recently been diagnosed with angina.
  • diagnose somebody (as) something He was diagnosed (as) a diabetic when he was 64.
  • diagnose somebody + adj./noun He was diagnosed (a) diabetic.

and diagnosis:

  • diagnosis (of something) the act of discovering or identifying the exact cause of an illness or a problem.

Usages:

  • diagnosis of lung cancer
  • They are waiting for the doctor's diagnosis.
  • An accurate diagnosis was made after a series of tests.
  • He was found by diagnosis to have does not sound appropriate as a sentence, he was diagnosed with or the diagnosis was are more appropriate alternatives.
  • Ngram: diagnosed with, diagnosed as
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The supplement to the OED records an earlier example of "diagnosis," from Phil Inductive Sci, 1840: "The Characteristick has been termed by some English botanists the diagnosis of plants...." Not the diagnosis of plant diseases. Thus I submit by the OED's own historical criterion, "diagnose" may take as its object either the patients (in this case, floral) or their maladies.

That said the reported incidence these days of walliballi disease is nothing short of alarming.

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  • +1 Interesting observation. My OP has elsewhere generated more heat than light. But your answer carries a useful validity.
    – WS2
    Commented Jun 24, 2015 at 7:43
  • So much better than my usual useless validity.
    – deadrat
    Commented Jun 24, 2015 at 7:50
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    I should have said luminescence!
    – WS2
    Commented Jun 24, 2015 at 8:07
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I think "diagnose" takes a patient as its indirect object and a disease as its direct object. "diagnose Hannah with malaria" / "diagnose malaria in Hannah" is parallel with "supply Hannah with an antidote" / "supply an antidote to Hannah". As with other indirect object constructions, the result of the event is that the indirect object has the direct object. Here, after the diagnosis, Hannah has the disease.

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  • No. In 'They diagnosed her as having TB', 'her' is as much a DO as in 'The judge found her guilty'.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jun 23, 2015 at 23:04
  • @EdwinAshworth, and as much a direct object as "The judge sent her the verdict"?
    – Greg Lee
    Commented Jun 23, 2015 at 23:25
  • +1 You have added significantly to the debate here. Supply would seem to me to be an example of a 'ditransitive verb'? (I am not a linguistics scholar in the way that @John Lawler is). But this seems to me to boil the whole matter down to whether diagnose is ditransitive; i.e. can it take two objects which refer to a theme and a recipient.
    – WS2
    Commented Jun 24, 2015 at 8:01
  • @Greg Lee The judge sent her the verdict <==> The judge sent the verdict to her. // The judge found her guilty <=/=> *The judge found guilty to [/for] her. // M-W defines 'transitive' as: grammar of a verb : having or taking a direct object and lists both V + disease and V + patient as transitive usages: diagnose transitive verb 1 a : to recognize (as a disease) by signs and symptoms b : to diagnose a disease or condition in <diagnosed the patient>
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jun 24, 2015 at 9:45
  • I like this idea in principle, but it requires extending the group of verbs that can take indirect objects without direct objects beyond the single verb tell. Additionally, when indirect object constructions are passivised, any other closely related adverbial phrase can usually be put either before or after the agent without much difference beyond a certain level of clumsiness (“The book was given [to her] by John [to her]”), but “Hannah was diagnosed by the doctor with malaria”/“Malaria was diagnosed by the doctor in Hannah” just sound downright wrong to me.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Jun 24, 2015 at 12:49
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This sounds like a case of back-formation. It's a well-established process that happens in pretty much all languages. If diagnose is not grammatical, then neither is edit or pea.

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  • Wait, pea? I don't get that one. Plea, maybe?
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Jun 23, 2015 at 22:56
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    You're missing an important point here. The only changes that are allowed to be made in English usage are those made before X was alive (X being the Grammar / Word Usage / Spelling / Punctuation ... Czar).
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jun 23, 2015 at 23:08
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    @DanBron pea is a back-formation from pease (interpreted as a plural).
    – user31341
    Commented Jun 24, 2015 at 0:10
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    @WS2 How can an individual decide at which point the process of changes in usage became unacceptable? Most of us gladly accept 100-year-old usages that are still current, but did the people who were in our shoes 100 years ago feel the same way? Almost all modern dictionaries – perhaps all those with a sensible number of pages – accept these modern usages for 'diagnose' (and OED will do when the editors catch up). Not to do so is perpetuating the etymological fallacy.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jun 24, 2015 at 9:23
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    Now that is a coincidence – I came across the intransitive sense of 'vapulate' (obsolete) once: to be whipped. Does that mean it was an anti-deponent verb?
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jun 24, 2015 at 23:13

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