despite the fact that there are different, even exclusionary atheroscleroses (see note on "Enactments that exclude"), it does not render the diagnosis meaningless, or dissolve into an infinite regress
Mol explains, 55: "there are different atheroscleroses in the hospital but despite the differences between them they are connected. Atherosclerosis enacted is more than one--but less than many. The body multiple is not fragmented. Even if it is multiple, it also hangs together"
recapped 84: "The manyfoldedness of objects enacted does not imply their fragmentation"
it has "various forms of coordination" (the topic of chapter 3)
"When the results of [...] two diagnostic techniques coincide they jointly enact a common object"
68: "Forget about the body. Just add up your findings." ("[T]here is not always a necessity to search for common ground" (87))
the disease becomes a "composite object" (70, and again on 71) that includes "[t]he social reality of living" among its "patchwork" identity, even though "nobody expects there to be a linear relation between a patient's physical disease and what we might call his 'social disease'"
it yields a "composite reality that is also a judgment about what to do"
recapped 87: "The various atheroscleroses enacted in hospital Z are sometimes coordinated and jointly form a single disease that somehow hangs together. But not always. Sometimes the incoherencies between different ways of enacting atherosclerosis aren't smoothed away. They are lived with"
117: "'atherosclerosis' is the word they use when they want to talk to one another. The terms is a coordinating mechanism operative in conjunction with the various distributions. It bridges the boundaries between the sites over which the disease is distributed. It thereby helps to prevent distribution from becoming the pluralizing of a disease into separate and unrelated objects"