This chapter provides an ethnographic case study of divided medicalization—the process through which multivalent, identitarian conditions get produced and then reduced to fit within a preexisting, disease-oriented clinical paradigm. The chapter is a clinical ethnography of a clinic located within a university medical center in an East Coast city, serving children diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. As medical categorizations and classifications expanded beyond the borders of the body to examine and remedy disorders of social life in the world, the staff shifted their own practice, exploring interventions that were playful and social, determined by pleasures as well as pathologies, and driven by the goal of expanding relationships rather than containing contagion. These interventions, however, crossed and complicated the clinic's carefully maintained boundaries between the inside and the outside of both the building and the body. In the end, the elements of autism that least fit within the existing medical paradigm were not incorporated into that paradigm but instead came to be extruded from it. Interpersonal, aesthetic, and identitarian elements of the condition were at first invited into but then gradually banished from the clinic, leaving behind an incomplete representation of complex social phenomena as diseases to be eliminated from individuals.
Voluntary Exercise in Mesothelioma: Effects on Tumour Growth and Treatment Response in a Murine Model
