“Diagnosis”, The History of Medicine and Health Seminars: Harrowing, discomfiting, perilous, brutish and unpleasant: the visibility of diagnostic procedures in Munchausen Syndrome in 1950s England

Diagnostic procedures in medicine are commonplace, from the classic stethoscope listening to a chest, to advanced computerised scans. Many are non-invasive, but there are some - biopsy for example - where skin is potentially scraped or cut, and tissue removed, in order to do diagnostic tests. The bodily impacts of diagnostic procedures are rarely mentioned in medical literature, but some have become highlighted by feminists, e.g. the pain of smear tests and cervical screenings. For there is one aspect of diagnosis that barely ever features - the potential harm done by diagnostics. There are considerable material effects of diagnosis when it involves cutting or scraping the skin, inserting instruments such as tubes or probes into various orifices, ingesting various substances such as barium, or having blood marked with radioactive isotopes. In Munchausen syndrome, the scars left by diagnostic procedures become hyper-visible - as markers of identification and infamy. Further, a tolerance of these procedures, newly-appraised as "harrowing", "discomfiting", "perilous", "brutish" and "unpleasant", becomes one of the key sites of pathology for Munchausen syndrome - a chronic and extreme form of illness deception that explodes into prominence in the early 1950s. This visibility and pathology has interesting