Annemarie first trained as a nurse at the Ecole d'infirmières in Nantes, France, and worked in a range of settings, including medical oncology, paediatric intensive care, neonatal intensive care, and as a first responder.
She was also an elite runner, and when she returned to complete her university education in 1995, it was at the School of Physical Education at the University of Otago. Annemarie completed her PhD in 2000. Her thesis, Visions of vice: Appearance and policy in feminine self-scrutiny was, in some ways, inspired by an incidental conversation she had with a female nursing colleague at the time.
As they were getting dressed for their shift, her colleague pinched her belly, pointed at the fold of fat between her fingers, and lamented “I’m so bad!”
That conversation prompted Annemarie to ponder why people think that their appearance reveals something about their inner moral qualities.
“There’s a long history of associating beauty with goodness,” says Annemarie. “I started looking at issues around body size and why we fixate on overweight as some sort of moral failing.” Her curiosity was to turn into a PhD thesis.
Just as obesity carried moral baggage, she found examples of the complex implications of diagnosis outside of its clinical use everywhere she turned. For example, in her first job after her PhD, hired to do a review of foetal death, she found herself mulling the categories used to define it.
“A miscarriage doesn’t get a death certificate, but a stillbirth does—that’s really important because with a stillbirth, you can put your baby in the cemetery, but you can’t if it’s a miscarriage,” she says.
Whether it was obesity, stillbirth or even influenza, little attention had been paid to the ways in which how we name disease shapes the experience of health, illness and disease. Curious, Jutel started writing about it and enlisting other scholars around the world to join in the discussion.
Her book, Putting a name to it: Diagnosis in contemporary society, published in 2011 by John Hopkins University Press, and now in its second edition, was a finalist for the Foundation of Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize. The book presented Annemarie’s ground-breaking work in diagnosis. She has since written two other books on diagnosis, has edited three, and has published innumerable articles.
It’s not just the categories of disease that interest Jutel, but also the power associated with being able to apply them. To be able to diagnose puts doctors at the top of the health hierarchy, a point that can create tension between the patient and the doctor.
“Not all diagnoses are welcome, as they can be stigmatising," she explains.
"At the same time, however, not getting a diagnosis when one feels very poorly is just as dissatisfying. We want a diagnosis, because it explains what’s going on, and it is the key to treatment. And, yet, medicine doesn’t always have the answers, which is frustrating.”
She points out that medically unexplained symptoms are often thought of as “in your head” which makes it even worse.
Annemarie joined Te Herenga Waka in 2010, rising to a full professorship in 2016, while her work into the sociology of diagnosis was becoming renowned across the globe. She is in the top 2% in her field in the prestigious international scholars ranking.
Describing herself as a ‘sandwiched’ third generation academic, Annemarie says her commitment to academia is total.
“My dad was an academic, my son’s an academic, and so is my husband! I’m right there in the middle.”
She underlines the importance of curiosity and critical thinking about all things, and particularly the categories that are used to describe and classify subjects, like diagnosis and disease.
Alongside her extensive academic research, Annemarie is also a successful graphic novelist and author, mountain biker, creative, mother, nurse, and ‘experiencer’ of many more things.
Annemarie encourages her students, and doctoral students in particular, not to think of their future as linear.
“I tell them to look at it more as an edifice—something you just keep building. You make a stable foundation, and you see what happens—how high you can go, what direction you take, whether there’s going to be a bay window or a wing.
“When you have a strong foundation, you can make knowledge and research matter.”