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The article discusses the perception of disease and its meanings. It is viewed that, to recognise disease in oneself or in others is to reflect on its moral importance. One's perception of disease have always prompted a search for attribution and responsibility; but more importantly they bring into focus the concerns he has about the way he lives his life, his relations to community, environment, and cosmos. Until the last few hundred years, those who suffered and those who sought to relieve suffering shared many assumptions about the character of health and disease. Bodies were constantly in a state of ebb and flow with their environment, themselves changing and subject to the changes around them. As societies became more complex, elite groups of healers emerged, and many of their theories and practices began to diverge from common intuitions of health and disease. The separation of disease diagnosis from the experience of sickness, and from the circumstances of suffering, is perhaps most striking in Europe.

Two geographically nonoverlapping species are currently described within the sparid genus Spondyliosoma: Spondyliosoma cantharus (Black Seabream) occurring across Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic waters from NW Europe to Angola and S. emarginatum (Steentjie) considered endemic to southern Africa. To address prominent knowledge gaps this study investigated range-wide phylogeographic structure across both species. Mitochondrial DNA sequences revealed deep phylogeographic structuring with four regionally partitioned reciprocally monophyletic clades, a Mediterranean clade and three more closely related Atlantic clades [NE Atlantic, Angola and South Africa (corresponding to S. emarginatum)]. Divergence and distribution of the lineages reflects survival in, and expansion from, disjunct glacial refuge areas. Cytonuclear differentiation of S. emarginatum supports its validity as a distinct species endemic to South African waters. However, the results also indicate that S. cantharus may be a cryptic species complex wherein the various regional lineages represent established/incipient species. A robust multilocus genetic assessment combining morphological data and detailing interactions among lineages is needed to determine the full diversity within Spondyliosoma and the most adequate biological and taxonomic status., (© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Fish Biology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Fisheries Society of the British Isles.)