“People do not ‘have’ diseases, which are really descriptive mechanisms created by contemporary medicine. People have stories, and the stories are narratives of their lives, their relationships, and the way they experience an illness.” Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives
This is another article that echoes some of the same ideas that Davis put forward, in particular of how Galton took Quetelet’s idea of the normal man and adapted it so that average came to represent mediocrity, and the upper quartile of the distribution curve represented progress and perfection, thus eliminating abnormality. In fact, the appropriation of the law of error to explain stability in social statistics has never been called into question: Continue reading “The Social Construction of Disability, by Debra Shogan”