Where do our choices of disciplines come from? How do we embody our papers or our papers embody us? Rare is the scholar with no embodied connection to their work. We all look at ourselves when we look at something else; that we should look at our bodies is part and parcel of critical thinking about our worlds.

My contribution to this volume is going to be a reflection on how our bodies (often) take us to our disciplines, both consciously and not. I provide this reflection via a retrospective of my own disciplinary work in the sociology of diagnosis.

The sociology of diagnosis is a relatively recent subdiscipline of sociology. It was first suggested as a point of potential interest by Mildred Blaxter in 1978, and then again by Phil Brown in 1990. It started taking off, not unexpectedly, in the era of diagnosis or about 2010. Just as diagnoses were proliferating in number in the International Classification of Diseases (World Health Organization, 2009), as self-diagnosis and crowdsourcing diagnosis started mesmerizing the masses, sociologists also started acknowledging what Blaxter had brought to their attention two decades earlier: that diagnosis was too glibly taken as a simple label for natural facts of disease.

The sociology of diagnosis explores diagnosis as a reflection of social values, beliefs, and power in relation to the material facts of disease. It focuses on understanding how assigning labels to disorders in particular ways affects our experience of disease. While many scholars had focused on what it was like to have a given diagnosis (say, the stigmatizing effect of HIV, the varying identities associated with cancer [Klawiter, 2004], or the bewildering and marginalizing experience of illness for which no diagnosis seems available [Dumit, 2006]), there was little focus on diagnosis itself, not only as a structure in medicine but also as a place at which power converges and social roles are created. Yet diagnosis had, and continues to have, an important definitional role in medicine as well as in social life. More than an object of study, the sociology of diagnosis provides an approach to studying matters of medical and sociologic concern.

My last book, Diagnosis: Truths and Tales (Jutel, 2019), was written to reflect on diagnosis stories. What is the story we tell ourselves, our patients, and the outside world about a serious diagnosis?