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traditional history of ideas. How then to write its history, avoiding both hype and getting lost in the details? As a one of the participants in the 1920s revision of the ICD declared in a frank letter to Dr. Norman White of the Health Section of the League of Nations: |
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You know, I am a great believer in taking things of this kind slowly. Statistics is a very unexciting field in which to work up a revolution. . . . I am offering you my personal opinion, of course, but it is this: that the Committee on joint causes of death propose, if it wishes, an ideal certificate and an ideal method of classifying joint causes of death, if it desires, in the next year or so, but that as a beginning it should propose some things which can be done and which the statisticians of the different countries feel that they can and want to do. If a few of these can be accomplished, then the Committee of experts and the Health Section can record some achievements which will pave the way for more fundamental reforms. (12B R842/ Doc. 51040, Doss. 22685, letter from Edgar Sydenstricker to Norman White, June 11 1925) |
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We will not attempt to give an overview of the whole range of infrastructural work. It is constitutive of, to use the unfortunate phrase, an "information age." (Unfortunate because those who write about this as the information age tend to immediately retrospectively define all of human history as the history of information processing, and thus to effectively deny specificity to whatever age they are defining.) The phrase draws attention away from the material bases and work practices that are analyzed in this chapter. Information cannot analytically be released from these contexts. |
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The infrastructural work entailed in both design and use of this classification system is considerable. As we have seen, the ICD is used worldwide by states (on death certificates), by insurance companies, and within hospitals. The ICD fits perfectly into Star and Ruhleder's (1996) definition of infrastructure (alluded to in the introduction and discussed in more detail in chapter 7 below). It is embedded in a myriad of databases. It is transparent as it invisibly supports medical work, and has wide spatial reach. (All countries in the world operate with a version of the ICD, though not always the same version!) It is learned as part of membership in the medical and medical actuarial professions, and it is linked with conventions of practice in all these domains. |
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The discipline and practice of statistics grew up during the nineteenth century (Porter 1986, Hacking 1990). As pioneering medical classifier Farr wrote: "statistics is eminently a science of classification" (1885, 252). As the word's etymology indicates, it was a discipline intimately connected with the rise of statehood. Political and economic life in the industrializing countries of Europe was becoming ever more |
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