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Nonchromogenic strains (the 'Battey' type, Runyon Group III): characteristics include variable pigmentation, late in appearance, not light-conditioned. |
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Rapid growers (Runyon Group IV): rapidly growing photochromogens. (Diagnostic Standards 1961, 17) |
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So one can have an "other" or residual category, but at some point even the garbage can will have to be ordered when it becomes large enough. |
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Further, the committee on the classification of tuberculosis was forced to recognize in general that: "all classifications are ephemeral" (Diagnosis 1955, 6, quoting the 1950 edition). The committee fully recognized the temporary, agreed-upon nature of its classification work (it is worth noting in passing how often in infrastructural work like the development of classification systems there is much greater sensitivity to such factors than appears in the published scientific papers). "Complete agreement with respect to the classification of pulmonary tuberculosis, even among the most experienced clinicians in the country, is impossible. . . . The classification presented represents a well-considered compromise of the views of outstanding clinicians." (Diagnosis 1955, 5, quoting the 1950 edition). |
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Indeed, the historiography presented by the texts of diagnostic handbooks was a mixture of pure Whiggish progress tinged with despair ("without roentgenology the fight against TB would be back where it was in the nineteenth century") (Diagnosis 1961, 67). A cyclical view of history that Vico would not have been ashamed to espouse: "Readers will note another of those shifts in emphasis that have characterized expositions of the pathogenesis of tuberculosis for thirty-five years. The concepts presented in the current edition are more closely allied to those of former years than to the views expressed in the last edition" (Diagnostic Standards 1955, 7). Or, from the 1961 edition: "The one item of change upon which all of our consultants agreed was the need for a classification to include the increasing number of cases which are neither truly 'active' nor 'inactive,' and, chiefly, cases of the 'open negative syndrome.' In defining such a new class and seeking a suitable name for it, we have reached back ten years and reinstated the once-retired term, 'quiescent,' which was previously applied to an intermediate class" (Diagnostic Standards 1961, v). |
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This example moves us into the terrain of tuberculosis and activity, considered in the next section. Here, though, it underscores the situation of the classification act in an historical flow, where time, |
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