ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out something of the way in which social relationships, language and technology interact to generate the material and intellectual conditions for social action. It suggests that mutual monitoring of health status is an integral part of the general mutual monitoring of interactional competence in any social interaction. Parents attempted in the first instance to categorise this illness as a routine trouble, a ripple on a pool of essential health. In time the accommodations required to justify this became too great and the unusual character of the events was recognised. Some identified it as a bout of indigestion, others as a recurrence of some illness, like gall bladder trouble, bronchitis or colic, and others put it down to an injury sustained at work. The relevance of some event for future action can be socially imposed only by coercion or by other members of some collectivity whose membership the sufferer values.
