Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
phenomenon in one's head will receive its precise name and localization as
an 'aneurysm on the anterior communicating artery' or 'right communicating
artery aneurysm'. It will also be visible to oneself on a computer display or
an X-ray fi lm. It is also during this phase that the size of the aneurysm in
millimetres, and its risk in per cent to rupture and end up in death, will be
presented with all the details that one also ought to know. It is now that
imaging methods such as angiography, CT and ERC obtain a non-medical
meaning that separates the painful examinations from others.
This phase - 'while waiting for something to happen' - appears to be
different for those who have had a 'cold' aneurysm discovered by accident
and those who have experienced a bleeding or ruptured aneurysm. For the
latter group, those who have experienced bodily discomfort, the disease as
diagnosed and described by the doctor will however not be identical with the
disease they experience themselves. An aneurysm can never be experienced as
a change in a vessel wall, even if the patient is able to understand the disease
in such a way. The gap that exists between the self and the biomedically
defi ned body has been described excellently by Jean Paul Sartre:
The problem of the body and its relations with consciousness is often
obscured by the fact that while the body is from the start posited as a
certain thing having its own laws and capable of being defi ned from
outside, consciousness is then reached by the type of inner intuition
which is peculiar to it. Actually if after grasping 'my' consciousness in its
absolute interiority and by a series of refl ective acts, I then seek to unite
it with a certain living object composed of a nervous system, a brain,
glands, digestive, respiratory, and circulatory organs whose very matter
is capable of being analyzed chemically into atoms of hydrogen, carbon,
nitrogen, phosphorus, etc., then I am going to encounter insurmountable
diffi culties. But all these diffi culties stem from the fact that I try to unite
my consciousness not with my body but with the body of others. In fact
the body which I have just described is not my body such it is for me.
[…] So far as the physicians have had any experience with my body, it
was with my body in the midst of the world and as it is for others. My
body as it is for me does not appear to me in the midst of the world.
(Sartre 1971: 279)
However, when analysing the social representations of aneurysms one
can fi nd that new meaning has been added which seems to bridge the gap
between the obscure and unfamiliar biomedical conceptions of aneurysm in
everyday life and the embodied condition or the lived disease. The storytellers
defi nitely attach great importance to the medical views on aneurysm, all
procedures and obscure details. But out of all the many individual stories on
the website, a core element in a social representation of aneurysm emerges,
where the aneurysm obtains a distinct and signifi cant extra-medical meaning
by a kind of marriage between lived experiences and a metaphor.
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