Mol frames her book as "a debate with the epistemological approach to knowledge, but also as a debate with the way in which the social sciences have studied the body and its diseases in the past" (viii)
"For a long time, social scientists have said that there is more than the physicalities treated by doctors. And then they used to study this 'more': a social and interpretive reality. They have differentiated between disease and illness, taking the latter as their object of study" (viii)
More on 12: "The first step of the social sciences in the field of medicine was to delineate illness as an important object to be added to a disease's physicalities. The second step was to stress that whatever doctors say about 'disease' is talk, that it is part of a realm of meaning, something relative to the specific perspective of the person talking."
Mol cautions against "perspectivalism," though (this in a separate note) and encourages a "third step," which "consists of foregrounding practicalities, materialities, events"