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The ‘disabilitization’ of medicine: The emergence of Quality of Life as a space to interrogate the concept of the medical model
- Source :
- History of the Human Sciences
- Publication Year :
- 2019
- Publisher :
- SAGE Publications, 2019.
-
Abstract
- This article presents an archaeological inquiry into the early histories of Quality of Life (QoL) measures, and takes this as an occasion to rethink the concept of the ‘medical model of disability’. Focusing on three instruments that set the ground for the emergence of QoL measures, namely, the Karnofsky Performance Scale (KPS, 1948), and the classification of functional capacity as a diagnostic criterion for heart diseases (Bainton, 1928) and as a supplementary aid to therapeutic criteria in rheumatoid arthritis ( Steinbrocker, Traeger, and Batterman, 1949 ) – I discuss how medicine, throughout the emergence of QoL, began to expand its gaze beyond the confines of the body to what that body does in daily life. Building upon Armstrong et al.’s notion of ‘distal symptoms’ (2007) and Wahlberg’s idea of ‘knowledge of living’ (2018), I propose the notion of disabilitization to encapsulate this expansion of the clinical gaze, through which medicine has come to articulate diseases and their treatments in new ways, and in so doing, has inadvertently created disability as a new kind of knowledge category in itself – a category that is defined not through its reduction to mere pathology, but through its dispersal into everyday life. I present this concept not as a periodization, but as a provocative discontinuity with the totalizing history assumed within the medical model of disability, and in so doing, ask what, in fact, holds ‘the medical model’ together, and whether there might be other ways of understanding medicine’s complex relationship to disability than what the concept of the medical model allows us to envisage.
- Subjects :
- History
Medical model
06 humanities and the arts
Space (commercial competition)
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Quality of life (healthcare)
History and Philosophy of Science
060402 drama & theater
Engineering ethics
030212 general & internal medicine
Sociology
Medical model of disability
0604 arts
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 1461720X and 09526951
- Volume :
- 32
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- History of the Human Sciences
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....1f01ef0a3b862d5365db837169243a82