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step further and see the adult male body as the unmarked category, since there are many more diseases restricted to women than restricted to men; there are sixteen categories or clusters of categories that apply only to males and forty-two that apply only to females. (ICD-10, 2: 26). Feminist critics of medicine have long remarked on the relative pathologizing of the female body (for example, Ehrenreich and English 1973). |
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To finish with the life cycle before moving on to other temporal features, we should note that death itself is remarkably poorly defined by comparison with life. One can scarcely die of old age (Fagot-Largeault 1989).
15 Unlike in the earlier editions of the ICD (see figures 2.4a and 2.4b), the closest that one may get comes under a banner disclaimer: |
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Ill-defined and unknown cause of morbidity and mortality (797799) |
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| | 797 | Senility without mention of psychosis | | | Old age | | | Senile: | | | Senescence debility | | | Senile asthenia | exhaustion | | Excludes: | senile psychoses (290.0290.9) | | (ICD-10, 1: 215) |
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The ICD's life cycle for humans is as follows: a spurt of intense activity at birth; timeless adulthood, when one is afflicted with a range of woes that carry their own temporalities; and an inglorious, ill-defined end. The effect of this is, paradoxically, to make the individual an undefined, tabula rasa onto which various diseases are inscribed. From this blank sheet one can read various stories (with the aid of the ICD), restoring first context and then inperpretation (which we shall deal with in the next section). |
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Time Story Two: The Virus |
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Diseases themselves change over time. HIV, for example, mutates rapidly in the individual sufferer, so that no two people suffer from the same disease, nor may the disease be identical with itself over time even within a person. This extreme variability of the object world is a problem for any classification system. The case of virus classification illuminates many features of categorizing difficulties and the strategies used to control them. We look here at some of the work of the |
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