‘Feeling Low’: The Emergence of a Concept of Low Blood Pressure and the Representation of an Embodied Identity

Abstract

In this paper I address the relationship between the body and the construction of medical knowledge. By reference to a series of participant-observation studies and interviews with clinicians, I identify how knowledge is acquired through bodily experience, and, how bodies are themselves categorised through their relationship to knowledge. The question which I address is: How do medical practitioners ‘make sense’ of formalised clinical knowledge and relate it to their own embodied experience of patients who often defy ‘standardised categorisation’?