HUI: Beautiful scars.

This article is the written account of a discussion between a group of indigenous women (trained both in Western and Indigenous knowledge systems), on the relevance of diagnosis in their conceptualisations of health and illness.

Between the Spaces: graphic diagnosis.

This illustrated essay describes the graphic diagnosis memoir as a form of illness narrative that uses a different way of telling stories than standard prose. A cartoon is broken into sequenced segments that ask the reader to jump across the gaps between the panels at the same time as they bridge the images and text assembled in each panel. To be successful in presenting a graphic story, the artist must be able to express an idea, but also must be able to project, or imagine, how readers will be able link ideas, images, and words. The cartoon diagnosis story makes the diagnosis relevant and visible. It does so by recognizing what reader and artist share, then adding, between the spaces, what separates them.

Past, present and imaginary: Pathography in all its forms.

Diagnosis is a profoundly social phenomenon which, while putatively identifying disease entities, also provides insights into how societies understand and explain health, illness and deviance. In this paper, we explore how diagnosis becomes part of popular culture through its use in many non-clinical settings. From historical diagnosis of long-deceased public personalities to media diagnoses of prominent politicians and even diagnostic analysis of fictitious characters, the diagnosis does meaningful social work, explaining diversity and legitimising deviance in the popular imagination. We discuss a range of diagnostic approaches from paleopathography to fictopathography, which all take place outside of the clinic. Through pathography, diagnosis creeps into widespread and everyday domains it has not occupied previously, performing medicalisation through popularisation. We describe how these pathographies capture, not the disorders of historical or fictitious figures, rather, the anxieties of a contemporary society, eager to explain deviance in ways that helps to make sense of the world, past, present and imaginary.

Uncertainty and the inconvenient facts of diagnosis.

One common contemporary usage of the term "diagnostic uncertainty" is to refer to cases for which a diagnosis is not, or cannot, be applied to the presenting case. This is a paradoxical usage, as the absence of diagnosis is often as close to a certainty as can be a human judgement. What makes this sociologically interesting is that it represents an "epistemic defence," or a means of accounting for a failure of medicine's explanatory system. This system is based on diagnosis, or the classification of individual complaints into recognizable diagnostic categories. Diagnosis is pivotal to medicine's epistemic setting, for it purports to explain illness via diagnosis, and yet is not always able to do so. This essay reviews this paradoxical use, and juxtaposes it to historical explanations for non-diagnosable illnesses. It demonstrates how representing non-diagnosis as uncertainty protects the epistemic setting by positioning the failure to locate a diagnosis in the individual, rather than in the medical paradigm.

Animals, veterinarians and the sociology of diagnosis.

While sociologists of medicine have focused their efforts on understanding human health, illness, and medicine, veterinary medical practice has not yet caught their attention in any sustained way. In this critical review article, we use insights from the sociology of diagnosis literature to explore veterinary practice, and aim to demonstrate the importance of animals to sociological understandings of health, illness and disease. As in human medicine, our analysis shows the importance of diagnosis in creating and maintaining the power and authority of the veterinary professional. However, we then explore how diagnosis operates as a kind of dance, where professional authority can be challenged, particularly in light of the complex ethical responsibilities and clinical interactions that result from the triad of professional/owner/animal patient. Finally, we consider diagnosis via the precept of entanglement, and raise the intriguing possibility of interspecies health relations, whereby decision-making in human health care may be influenced by experiences in animal health care and vice-versa. In our conclusion, we argue that this analysis provides opportunities to scholars researching diagnosis in human health care, particularly around the impact of commercial drivers; has implications for veterinary and public health practitioners; and should help animate the emerging sociology of veterinary medicine.

Fighting Words in the Antipodes.

In this commentary, written in two bursts-the first completed in April 2020, and the second at the end of July-we explore how media metaphors of COVID-19 constitute the pandemic in Australia and New Zealand. We argue that the media's rhetorical strategies play an important role not only in describing the illness, but in influencing and shaping individual and collective responses to the pandemic, with significant consequences for mental health and well-being in the context of crisis. We align this commentary with the tenets of the sociology of diagnosis, which argue that even though there are material realities of disease, their social form and consequence cannot be separated from the tangible nature of illness and its management. We also lean on Derrida's approach to metaphor, which underlines how even observable viral entities such as COVID-19 are simultaneously material, abstract, and in flux. We describe the metaphors used by local media to describe the pandemic-including combat, bush fires, earthquakes, and other natural disasters-and we explore how and why these metaphors construct the pandemic locally and farther afield.

More than a "touch of the flu": a response to Mayrhuber et al's ""with fever it's the real flu I would say": laypersons' perception of common cold and influenza and their differences - a qualitative study in Austria, Belgium and Croatia".

This short reply contests two assumptions made by the authors of Mayrhuber et al's. "With fever it's the real flu I would say." The first is that there is influenza can be reliably defined by a medical case definition. The second is that this small qualitative study can be generalisable. However, it does underline the important point that technical diagnostic terms may be used on different registers by a variety of actors in the medical setting.

Diagnosis: a critical social reflection in the genomic era.

Diagnosis is a pivotal tool for the work of medicine as they categorise and classify individual ailments via a generalised schema. However diagnosis is also a profoundly social act, which reflects society, its values and how it makes sense of illness and disease. Considering diagnosis critically, as well as practically, is an important job of the sociologist. This paper reviews how a social model can provide a critical tool for viewing diagnosis in the genomic era. It explores how the formulation of diagnosis, be it via genetic explanations or microbiological ones, are the product of social discovery, negotiation, and consensus.