Borges on classification

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Abstract
The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote in 1942 an essay titled ‘El idioma analítico de John Wilkins’ in which he laid out the challenges of human attempts to classify the world [1]. To illustrate his argument, Borges reproduced a classification of animals purportedly found in ‘a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled “Celestial [Emporium]” of Benevolent Knowledge’.1 The ‘ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies’ of classification schemes noted by Borges may have a familiar ring for the experts of the WHO World Alliance on Patient Safety, as they tackle the development of a comprehensive international classification of patient safety events [2]. To contribute to the work of the World Alliance, we at the Journal have applied the categorization of animals in ancient China to classify patient safety events. One cannot help being impressed by the remarkable homology between the two taxonomies (Table 1).

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