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For the second point, mutual exclusivity may be impossible in practice, as when there is disagreement or ambivalence about the membership of an object in a category. Medicine is replete with such examples, especially when the disease entity is controversial or socially stigmatized. On the third point, completeness, there may be good reasons to ignore data that would make a system more comprehensive. The discovery of a new species on an economically important development site may be silenced for monetary considerations. An anomaly may be acknowledged, but be too expensivepolitically or bureaucraticallyto introduce into a system of record keeping. In chapter 2, we demonstrate ways of reading classification systems so as to be simultaneously sensitive to these conceptual, organizational, and political dimensions. |
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Consider the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which is used as a major example throughout this book. The full title of the current (tenth) edition of the ICD, is: "ICD-10International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems; Tenth Revision." Note that it is designated a statistical classification: Only diseases that are statistically significant are entered here (it is not an attempt to classify all diseases). |
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The ICD is labeled a "classification," even though many have said that it is a "nomenclature" since it has no single classificatory principle (it has at least four, which are not mutually exclusive, a point developed in chapter 4). A nomenclature simply means an agreed-upon naming scheme, one that need not follow any classificatory principles. The nomenclature of streets in Paris, for example, includes those named after intellectual figures, plants and trees, battles, and politicians, as well as those inherited from former governments, such as Rue de Lutèce (Lutèce was the ancient Roman name for Paris). This is no classificatory system. Nomenclature and classification are frequently confused, however, since attempts are often made to model nomenclature on a single, stable system of classification principles, as for example with botany (Bowker, in press) or anatomy. In the case of the ICD, diagnostic nomenclature and the terms in the ICD itself were conflated in the American system of diagnosis-related groups (DRGs), much to the dismay of some medical researchers. In many cases the ICD represents a compromise between conflicting schemes." The terms used in categories C82C85 for non-Hodgkin's lymphomas are those of the Working Formulation, which attempted to find common ground among several major classification systems. The terms used in these schemes are not given in the Tabular List but appear in the Alphabeti- |
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