ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Shifting Perspectives on Disease Entities

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel examines the historical practices that have contributed to the production of knowledge about disease entities across domains of diagnosis, classification, and research. It investigates how the production of knowledge about disease has been shaped and negotiated through interactions among technological practices, modes of classification and standardization, the exchange and circulation of materials, and the voices of patients and practitioners.

Conceptions of disease are produced and shaped by a diverse set of actors, institutions, and modes of understanding. These may include groups of symptoms experienced by patients, on technologies that classify and monitor diseases pathologically, or on biochemical or physiological tests used to define and characterize disease. These modalities of diagnosis and assessment arise from particular historical and social contexts, yet they often remain embedded in structures and practices of knowledge-making that prioritize some voices and aspects of disease over others.

The papers in this panel examine how various methods of understanding, defining, and detecting disease entities, across different times and places, have been prioritized, negotiated, or shaped by social and institutional needs and emerging standards of precision and specificity. By shifting perspectives to address specific cases in which the voices of patients, the exchange and circulation of materials, and the formation of categories are negotiated and contested, the panel illustrates how disease is continually made and remade through historical practices, classificatory systems and claims to authority.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Jenny Bangham, University of Edinburgh

Individual Presentations

• Negotiating Autoimmunity: Experiential Knowledge and Material Practice in Reshaping Rheumatoid Arthritis in the U.S., 1950-1970 - Sofia Grant, Johns Hopkins University

• The Making of “Diseases of Culture”: Diet, diagnosis, and modernity in early twentieth century Denmark - Andreas Schmidt Eriksen, University of Copenhagen

• Around the world in a paraffin block: Cancer, classification and circulating human remains - Tricia Close Koenig, University of Strasbourg

• Classificatory histories of cancer and diabetes - Karin Tybjerg, University of Copenhagen

Session Organizers

• Karin Tybjerg, University of Copenhagen

• Sofia Grant, Johns Hopkins University