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'Feeling low': The emergence of a concept of low blood pressure and the representation of an embodied identity
Gillian Hatt
School of Social and Cultural Studies, Edith Cowan University, Perth WA
Abstract
In this paper I address the relationship between the body and the construction of medical knowledge. By reference to a series of participant-observation studies and interviews with clinicians, I identify how knowledge is acquired through bodily experience, and, how bodies are themselves categorised through their relationship to knowledge. The question which I address is: How do medical practitioners `make sense' of formalised clinical knowledge and relate it to their own embodied experience of patients who often defy `standardised categorisation'?
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