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Judith Felson Duchan and Dana Kovarsky (eds.), Diagnosis as cultural practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2008

Ellen Barton
Ellen Barton
Affiliation:
Linguistics Program, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202 USA, ellen.barton@wayne.edu
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Extract

Judith Felson Duchan and Dana Kovarsky (eds.), Diagnosis as cultural practice. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. Pp. x, 307, Pb. $32.95.

This volume contributes to a growing body of literature on diagnosis as sociocultural and interactional practices in medicine particularly and society generally. Diagnosis is typically defined solely in terms of expertise within a biomedical model: “the art or act of identifying a disease from its signs and symptoms” (Medline Plus 2005), a definition that incorporates medicine's deeply ambivalent attitude toward lay knowledge with its distinction between symptoms subjectively reported by patients and signs objectively observed by physicians. In the first chapter of this volume, however, the editors set out a broader social model of diagnosis as (i) a way of experiencing, doing, and thinking that is pervasive in Western culture, (ii) constructed by lay people as well as professional experts, (iii) socially situated and culturally sensitive, (iv) a process and product of social interaction and social discourse, that (v) can have a life altering impact on those diagnosed (p. 1).

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Information
Language in Society , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , February 2008 , pp. 119 - 123
Copyright
© 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

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Heath, Christian (1992). The delivery and reception of diagnosis in the general-practice consultation. In Paul Drew & John Heritage (eds.), Talk at work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, 235–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Medline Plus (2005). Medical Dictionary. http://medlineplus.gov. Washington, DC: US National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. Accessed 9/4/2006.
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