Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to this 'silent' condition. As a result the only way to manage this potentially
threatening condition seems to be by medical monitoring. A young woman
who does not even have a diagnosed 'cold' aneurysm, but whose mother just
died of a ruptured aneurysm, thinks about the condition in this way:
It was a long and diffi cult process dealing with my mother's death. We
now believe that aneurysms run in our family. So far luckily no one else
has had one. I now have to deal with the idea that I may have a 'ticking
time bomb' in my head. I plan to have the tests run soon, and will go on
from there.
In the formation of the social representations on the studied website, the
unfamiliar biomedical phenomenon aneurysm has thus been anchored in a
well-known cultural icon, the ticking bomb.
Discussion and concluding comments
In this chapter I have presented an analysis of how participants on an
illness narrative site on the Internet depict their experiences of ruptured or
treated brain aneurysms. I have also explored some core elements in a social
representation of the unruptured aneurysm which has emerged on this site.
In the context of the production of this social representation, people with
experiences of aneurysms become both meaning recipients and meaning
producers. Though the stories are written by people who have never met,
they infl uence and are infl uenced by each other. This can be observed in the
way storytellers implicitly or explicitly refer to previous stories and in their
updates to subsequent ones. The representation is not emerging out of an
individual story but out of the collection of coexisting stories. Albeit the
stories elaborate different ideas, they tend to bracket differences and focus
on solidarity. Together they reinforce the idea of an aneurysm as a corporeal
risk, by mediating a kernel image of a ticking bomb in the brain.
Studies of lay conceptions of cancer have shown that people are using
the bomb metaphor also to conceptualize cancer, if the disease is conceived
as genetically determined (Robertson 2001, Tegern 1994). In the cancer
case however, the bomb metaphor has no direct connection to the nature of
the symptoms, nor to the conception of an explosion-like course of events,
which sometimes is the case in rupturing aneurysms. In lay conceptions
of cancer the metaphor rather stresses the supposedly fi xed but hidden
time of onset. In the case of aneurysm, the explored kernel image of the
representation apparently bridges the gap between the two levels of reality
that Sartre (1971) distinguishes as 'the body for others' and 'my body such
it is for me'. In the representation, features of the lived disease merge with
properties of a well-known cultural icon.
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For the patient, the representation
does not replace given biomedical conceptions and the X-ray visualizations
of the condition, or the memory of uneasy sensory sensations that many
