ABSTRACT
The current popularity of testing and screening procedures to diagnose disease in its early stages is a modernist response to the threat of disease and death, especially that which lurks invisibly in the body. The ill or diseased body often no longer announces its condition in luridly visible ways: pathology has become reduced to the invisible workings of cells, lymphocytes, bacteria and viruses. To detect this silent illness, a diagnostic test is put forward as the solution. Concordant with the ideology of rationality which permeates biomedical discourses and practices, it is believed important to have ‘knowledge’ of the presence of a hidden illness within rather than remain ignorant, for such knowledge is viewed as allowing medical science the opportunity to step in (Herzlich and Pierret, 1987: 94; Nelkin and Tancredi, 1989). The discourse of diagnostic testing and screening represents these procedures as ‘scientific’ and objective, value-free determinations of a reality uncontaminated by social processes: ‘The test is seen as an isolated event in which objective technical data rationally persuades patients of their normality thus determining the benefit, reassurance’ (Daly, 1989: 100, emphasis in the original).
