While diagnosis is important in identifying and curing disease, it also has a strong social impact.  Diagnosis can be a source of anxiety or of relief, of hope or of despair.  It structures the experience of health and illness, deciding what counts at normal, defining who is responsible for what disorders, providing frameworks for communication and structuring relationships. It presents a point around which tensions may develop, and interests collide.  This presentation will present the sociology of diagnosis, underlining how the material reality of disease is both shaped by, and influences, social life, with a particular focus on women’s experience of illness.

Annemarie Jutel is author of Putting a Name to It: Diagnosis in Contemporary Society (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Jutel trained as a nurse at l'Ecole d infirmieres in Nantes, France and has practiced in France, the US and now New Zealand. She left clinical work in 2000 to focus on sociological aspects of health and illness. Her ground-breaking work in the sociology of diagnosis focuses on how medical classification interacts with social and cultural interests. She has written on the medicalisation of overweight, female sexuality and foetal death.

 Lunch will be served, please RSVP: mfe@drexel.edu

Co-sponsored event by Women's Studies and the Working Group on Commodification, Technology & Gender