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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2008
Judith Felson Duchan and Dana Kovarsky (eds.), Diagnosis as cultural practice. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. Pp. x, 307, Pb. $32.95.
This volume contributes to a growing body of literature on diagnosis as sociocultural and interactional practices in medicine particularly and society generally. Diagnosis is typically defined solely in terms of expertise within a biomedical model: “the art or act of identifying a disease from its signs and symptoms” (Medline Plus 2005), a definition that incorporates medicine's deeply ambivalent attitude toward lay knowledge with its distinction between symptoms subjectively reported by patients and signs objectively observed by physicians. In the first chapter of this volume, however, the editors set out a broader social model of diagnosis as (i) a way of experiencing, doing, and thinking that is pervasive in Western culture, (ii) constructed by lay people as well as professional experts, (iii) socially situated and culturally sensitive, (iv) a process and product of social interaction and social discourse, that (v) can have a life altering impact on those diagnosed (p. 1).