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series of stories that are the preferred narratives of the ICD's designers. Certain attributions of intentionality are easy to make; others are rather difficult. Some ways of life are clearly considered to be well led, others are called into question. Sometimes context is important; sometimes it can be ignored. Stories also come and go, narratives fade in importance (the example of AIDS moving, in medical terms, from a specifically gay-linked disease to a more general one). If one should have doubts about how to encode a given story, one can turn to volume 2 of the classification, which gives an extensive set of rules for the interpretation of causes of death. In this section, we will look at the various aids to storytelling to be found within the ICD. |
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Frequently, when diseases have first been named, they have taken on the name of their first scientific describer, of a famous victim, or of the place where they occur. Each of these kinds of naming strategy tells a simple story to accompany the classification. Throughout the history of classification systems over the past 200 years such specifications have progressively been winnowed away to make way for new kinds of context and new kinds of description now considered more interesting and relevant. |
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What many sufferers of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis know as Lou Gehrig's disease is coded by the ICD-10 as G12.2: motor neuron disease. (With the famous physicist Stephen Hawking now suffering from the disease, it may in future be more well known to the lay public as Hawking's disease, though baseball player Lou Gehrig first brought it to public awareness.) In the index to the ICD, the Parisian neurologist Charcot can lay claim to an arthropathy (tabetic), a cirrhosis, and a syndrome. In the body of the text, the great doctor tends to slip away; Charcot's syndrome becomes 173.9 peripheral vascular disease, unspecified, and there is no mention of Charcot. The 173s (other peripheral vascular diseases) are an interesting category. They show the various forms of modality: 173.0 is still proudly Raynaud's syndrome, 173.1 is thromboangiitis obliterans [Buerger], 173.8 is other specified peripheral vascular diseases, and includes acroparaesthesiasimple [Schultze's type] or vasomotor [Nothnagel's type]. In general, as the modalities get deleted the name of the person goes from being the name of the disease to a bracket after the name to an entry in the index, until finally it slides gracefully out of the index onto the scrap heap of history. A similar |
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