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complex. States experienced the need to gather and keep information about their citizenry. Medical statistics emerged as part of this burgeoning information-gathering activity. |
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Medical Classification and the State |
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During this century large modern states have found themselves forced into developing complex classification systems to promote their political and economic smooth functioning; people are travelling further and more frequently and living longer, more information-dense lives. Producing these classifications is tedious, long, committee work. It is nonheroic work, carried out by bureaucrats. For many, such work does not have a history. The archives of the WHO in Geneva preserve in black leather boxes stamped with gold on bright steel shelves the records of the struggle against smallpox. Western medicine defeats ancient enemy! The boxes stand proudly on the shelves, a battery of headlines awaiting a chronicler. |
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In searching for the archives of the construction and revision of the ICD, however, we were unable to find any such centralized and well-archived cache. Typically for an information infrastructure, the achievement of producing and maintaining a standard international list of causes of deatha massive bureaucratic, scientific, technical, statistical, epidemiological, human achievementis considered beneath archival priority. Until recently, when every ten years a new edition was produced, records of the negotiations leading up to those editions were destroyed. Some earlier information remains as correspondence of individuals or committee associated with the League of Nations, or later the United Nations or WHO. For it usually appeared to the ICD's designers, its record-keepers, and even those involved in implementing it, that what was interesting scientifically was the agreed-upon outcome, not the error-strewn path leading to it. That has for the most part been seen as too boring to bother with (with some notable exceptions that we shall discuss below). |
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The ICD's lack of formal, boxed archives does not mean that it lacks history, as we have shown in the last chapter. Inscribed in the form and content of the list, as we saw, are a series of technical, social, political, and economic decisions taken at different moments. These decisions, taken at particular times for a given set of reasons, are paradoxically often more entrenched in the otherwise ahistorical ICD than they would be in some other form of historical object. This is due |
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