“Father’s Kin”, or “Autosomal Dominant Inheritance”: Reconsidering the Opposition between Illness and Disease

Abstract

The article offers one way to reconsider the opposition illness/disease, which has become the key to many texts in medical anthropology. First, we analyze how and in what context this opposition arose. Further, we show how it was revised by STS scholars, in particular, Annemarie Mol. We analyze audio recordings of medical genetic consultations collected at a big medical center in Moscow in 2018. Instead of making the dichotomy illness/disease a starting point, but rather an object of interest, we consider how the concepts of hereditary diseases and the kinship itself are differently enacted in interactions between the doctor and the patient. Doctors appeal to some general principles and mechanisms that govern genetic inheritance. Patients articulate relations with relatives based on communication with them in the family circle. In a way, doctors generalize family ties through statistics and biological knowledge about inheritance, while patients, on the contrary, specify these relations and appeal to concrete everyday experiences.