The Kindness of Strangers: Kinds and Politics in Classification Systems - administrative history of large-scale classification systems

Library Trends, Fall, 1998 by Geoffrey C. Bowker

   Many patients feel that one of the greatest burdens of having chronic
   fatigue syndrome is the name of the illness. The word "fatigue" (which many
   patients refer to as the "F" word) indicates everyday tiredness. It
   reinforces negative perceptions that remain with the public and most
   medical doctors, despite a decade of steady, gradual research advances.
   (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Electronic Newsletter, 20 February, 1997)

One option was to name it after Darwin, but it was felt that, although he had the scientific cachet, he did not necessarily have the disease. Inversely, Florence Nightingale's diagnosis is more certain but less prestigious:

   Nightingale's. (A general note: no historical figure has been definitively
   diagnosed with CFS/M.E. Purists may object to choosing any person in
   history, who may not have actually had the disease, as the basis for an
   eponym.) Florence Nightingale is a widely respected and world-renowned
   figure who founded the International Red Cross and the first formal school
   for nursing. For decades she had an undiagnosed, severely debilitating,
   illness with symptoms similar to CFS. Despite Nightingale's considerable
   talents and her personal character, many doubted that she had a physical
   illness. Her illness was quite controversial. A 1996 paper by D.A.B. Young
   that appeared in the British Medical Journal indicates that Nightingale's
   illness was likely to have been chronic brucellosis (a disease with
   symptoms similar but not identical to CFS). Patient groups have promoted
   Nightingale's birthday, May 12, as International CFIDS/M.E. Awareness Day,
   and Nightingale is a familiar symbol to those who know this disease.
   However, some argue that women's diseases often have difficulty in getting
   recognized and accepted. Choosing Nightingale's name as an eponym might add
   to, rather than offer relief from, current name-associated problems.
   (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Electronic Newsletter, 20 February 1997)

More generally, Taylor, from a linguistic perspective, and Durkheim and Mauss (1968) (for whom primitive social classifications "seem to link, without any discontinuity, with the first scientific classifications" [p. 82]) from an anthropological one have observed that our technical classifications grow out of, and have to answer to, commonsense socially comfortable classifications. It just would not be socially feasible to call a donkey a fish no matter how good your scientific grounds.

There is no great divide between folk and scientific classifications. Below, we discuss one particular fault line between the two: a fracture that is constantly being redefined and changing its nature as the plate of lived experience is subducted under the crust of scientific knowledge. This fault line is the ways in which temporal experience--i.e., history, experience, development, memory, evolution--is registered in, and expressed by, two formal classification systems--the ICD and the INV. The crack comes when the messy flow of bodily and natural experience must be ordered against a formal neat set of categories. We will trace this particular faultline across the two classification schemes. It is the case that all complex classification schemes in fact have multiple sets of faults and fractures arising from similar tensions. On a meta level, the system of faults and tensions forms a kind of texture of any given organizational terrain; mapping this texture is a major research challenge for the field of social informatics.