Reflections and Transmutations: A Portrait of the Diabetic as a Young Man

Hisham Ayoub

doi:10.17125/plaid.2019.119

Abstract

My life as I had known it would become what the physician and historian Chris Feudtner termed, transmuted . He argued, diabetes as a disease concept had transmuted , changing over time by society’s interference in its natural progression. And so began my transmutation, as I reflect upon my life, the life of a young man as a diabetic whose natural progression was altered less by the disease and more by society’s attempts to define and control it.

Highlights

Monday morning the young physician had verbalized his worry that I may be suffering from diabetes
In his paper A Disease In Motion: Diabetes History and the New Paradigm of Transmuted Disease Feudtner argued that diabetes as a disease concept was transmuted by “medical interventions, diverting the natural history of diseases [such as diabetes] onto other, more chronic courses” [1]
Patients’ experiences with diabetes were diverted “away from the path defined by the natural history and towards what is more accurately called a transmuted course” [1]

Summary

Audience Perspectives

I wrote this essay with the aim to highlight how society chooses to define a disease and influence the identity of those who are living with it. I said that I tried but I kept waking up in the middle of the night to relieve the pent-up liquids that I had been drinking He had succumbed to my stubborn intentions, finding himself a victim of my circular entrapment. I was a young man, even though the physician had declared to my parents in that hospital room that I had become at that moment, a diabetic. Feudtner’s historical account of diabetes utilized a dynamic approach , whence he called diabetes a “disease in motion,” transformed by cycles of new medical interventions and therapeutic paradigms He argued, diabetes as a disease concept had transmuted, changing over time by society’s interferences in its natural progression. Began my transmutation, as I reflect upon my life, the life of a young man as a diabetic whose natural progression was altered less by the disease and more by society’s attempts to define and control it

DIABETES AS IDENTITY

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL TRANSFORMATIONS

CONFESSIONS OF A DIABETIC