|
|
|
|
|
|
|
mumps might be prototypical diseases; but arthritis, a card-carrying ICD-10 disease, might be seen rather as a condition. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
So why do we sometimes appear in practice prototypical in our classifications, even if in principal we are Aristotelian? For two main reasons: because each classification system is tied to a particular set of coding practices; and because classification systems in general (we are not making this as an ex cathedra pronouncement) reflect the conflicting, contradictory motives of the sociotechnical situations that gave rise to them. Ritvo notes a similar phenomenon in eighteenth-century zoological classification, and for the same reasons; she states that: |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Eighteenth-century systems reflected competing, if unacknowledged, principles of organization that undermined both their schematic novelty and their claim to be based on objective analysis of the natural world. These competing principles usually divided animals into groups based not on their physical characteristics but on subjective perceptions of them. . . . Rather than analyzing nature exclusively on its own termsthe claim embodied in their formal systemsnaturalists often implicitly presented it in terms of its relationship to people, even constructing formal categories that echoed the anthropocentric and sentimental projection characteristic of both the bestiary tradition they had so emphatically discarded and (then as now) of much vernacular discourse about animals. (1997, 3839) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Goldstein (1987, 379) also notes that prototypical categories are themselves manufactured, accented, and dramaturgically presented. In her discussion of the development of neurological categorization in the nineteenth century, she notes the, |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
. . . theatricality of Charcot's Friday lessons, where patients in nervous crisis and hypnotic trance were exhibited before an avid audience, including artists and litterateurs as well as physicians. When Charcot lectured on tremors, for example, the afflicted patients appeared wearing headdresses decorated with long plumes, whose distinctive, feathery vibrations illustrated the different varieties of the pathology. (Goldstein 1987, 169171) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
At any given moment, she points out, a particular category may become famous or politicized, or seize the popular imagination. This is of course the case throughout the worlds of classification. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Consider the ICD. When originally drawn up, it had a maximum of 200 categories. As we note above, this was not the number of diseases |
|
|
|
|
|