Diagnosis

“One must conclude that diagnostic tests and drugs have been among many significant factors aggregating to constitute and reconstitute the disease. These technologies themselves have been products of particular cultural moments. The privileging of one technology over another (iron pills over hemacytometers) in the construction of disease cannot be understood apart from broader cultural assumptions about professional identity, patients’ identity, and the nature and location of disease. . . . [The users of technologies] have described diseases that suit contemporary concerns. Theirs have been contingent, and historically bound, portraits of disease, linked to a politics of medical practitioners and to particular problems of womanhood in their time” (Wailoo I, 70-71).