The Fallible Body: Narratives of Health, Illness & Disease

The Fallible Body: Narratives of Health, Illness & Disease PDF

Author: Vera Kalitzkus

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-09-25

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1904710409

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There is perhaps no subject that lends itself to interdisciplinarity better than corporeal finitude, and it is a recognition of this fact that, from 12 to 15 July 2006, a group of international scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners were brought together for the 5th annual conference Making Sense of: Health Illness, and Disease.

Bodies of Truth

Bodies of Truth PDF

Author: Dinty W. Moore

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Published: 2019-01-01

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1496203607

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“Medicine still contains an oral tradition, passed down in stories: the stories patients tell us, the ones we tell them, and the ones we tell ourselves,” writes contributor Madaline Harrison. Bodies of Truth continues this tradition through a variety of narrative approaches by writers representing all facets of health care. And, since all of us have been or will be touched by illness or disability—our own or that of a loved one—at some point in our lives, any reader of this anthology can relate to the challenges, frustrations, and pain—both physical and emotional—that the contributors have experienced. Bodies of Truth offers perspectives on a wide array of issues, from food allergies, cancer, and neurology to mental health, autoimmune disorders, and therapeutic music. These experiences are recounted by patients, nurses, doctors, parents, children, caregivers, and others who attempt to articulate the intangible human and emotional factors that surround life when it intersects with the medical field.

Stories of Illness and Healing

Stories of Illness and Healing PDF

Author: Sayantani DasGupta

Publisher: Literature and Medicine

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13:

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A collection of women's illness narratives Stories of Illness and Healing is the first collection to place the voices of women experiencing illness alongside analytical writing from prominent scholars in the field of narrative medicine. The collection includes a variety of women's illness narratives--poetry, essays, short fiction, short drama, analyses, and transcribed oral testimonies--as well as traditional analytic essays about themes and issues raised by the narratives. Stories of Illness and Healing bridges the artificial divide between women's lives and scholarship in gender, health, and medicine. The authors of these narratives are diverse in age, ethnicity, family situation, sexual orientation, and economic status. They are doctors, patients, spouses, mothers, daughters, activists, writers, educators, and performers. The narratives serve to acknowledge that women's illness experiences are more than their diseases, that they encompass their entire lives. The pages of this book echo with personal accounts of illness, diagnosis, and treatment. They reflect the social constructions of women's bodies, their experiences of sexuality and reproduction, and their roles as professional and family caregivers. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Stories of Illness and Healing draws the connection between women's suffering and advocacy for women's lives.

The Illness Narratives

The Illness Narratives PDF

Author: Arthur Kleinman

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 1989-10-02

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9780465032044

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From one of America's most celebrated psychiatrists, the book that has taught generations of healers why healing the sick is about more than just diagnosing their illness Western medicine treats sick patients like broken machines -- figure out what is physically wrong, fix it, and send the patient on their way. But humans are not machines. When we are ill, we experience our illness: we become scared, distressed, tired, weary. Our illnesses are not just biological conditions, but human ones. It was Arthur Kleinman, a Harvard psychiatrist and anthropologist, who saw this truth when most of his fellow doctors did not. Based on decades of clinical experience studying and treating chronic illness, The Illness Narratives makes a case for interpreting the illness experience of patients as a core feature of doctoring. Before Being Mortal or The Body Keeps the Score, there was The Illness Narratives. It remains today a prescient and passionate case for bridging the gap between patient and practitioner.

The Wounded Storyteller

The Wounded Storyteller PDF

Author: Arthur W. Frank

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1997-05-15

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0226259935

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Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine; they are wounded storytellers, Frank argues. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering; when they turn their diseases into stories, they find healing. Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as on the stories of people he has met during years spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness narratives, ranging from the well-known - Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer - to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilities. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness - stories of restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that illness can be transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new. Understanding these three narrative types helps us to hear the ill, but ultimately illness stories are more. Frank presents these stories as a form of testimony: the ill person is more than a survivor; she is a witness. Schooled in a "pedagogy of suffering", the ill person reaches out to others, offering a truth about living. The truth is a starting point for a "narrative ethics", as private experiences become public voices. Wounded storytellers teach more than a new way to understand illness; they exemplify an emergingethic of postmodern times.

Contemporary Trauma Narratives

Contemporary Trauma Narratives PDF

Author: Jean-Michel Ganteau

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-27

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1317684710

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This book provides a comprehensive compilation of essays on the relationship between formal experimentation and ethics in a number of generically hybrid or "liminal" narratives dealing with individual and collective traumas, running the spectrum from the testimonial novel and the fictional autobiography to the fake memoir, written by a variety of famous, more neglected contemporary British, Irish, US, Canadian, and German writers. Building on the psychological insights and theorizing of the fathers of trauma studies (Janet, Freud, Ferenczi) and of contemporary trauma critics and theorists, the articles examine the narrative strategies, structural experimentations and hybridizations of forms, paying special attention to the way in which the texts fight the unrepresentability of trauma by performing rather than representing it. The ethicality or unethicality involved in this endeavor is assessed from the combined perspectives of the non-foundational, non-cognitive, discursive ethics of alterity inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, and the ethics of vulnerability. This approach makes Contemporary Trauma Narratives an excellent resource for scholars of contemporary literature, trauma studies and literary theory.

Visceral

Visceral PDF

Author: Maia Dolphin-Krute

Publisher: punctum books

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 1947447262

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Memoirs about being sick are popular and everywhere and only ever contribute to pop narratives of illness as a single event or heroic struggle or journey. Visceral: Essays on Illness as Metaphor is not that. Visceral, to the extent that it is a memoir, is a record not of illness but of the research project being sick became. While rooted firmly in critical disability and queer practices, the use of personal narratives opens these approaches up to new ways of writing the body-ultimately a body that is at once theoretical and unavoidably physical. A body where everything is visceral, so theory must be too. From the gothic networks of healthcare bureaucracy and hospital philanthropy to the proliferation of wellness media, off-label usage of drugs, and running off to live a life with, these essays move fluidly through theoretical and physical anger, curiosity and surprise. Arguing for disability rights that attend to the theoretical as much as the physical, this is Illness Not As Metaphor, Being Sick and Time, and The Body in Actual Pain as one. A sick body of text that is-and is not-in direct correspondence to an actual sick body, Visceral is an unrelenting examination of chronic illness that turns towards the theoretical only to find itself in the realms of the biological and autobiographical: because how much theory can a body take?

Stories of Sickness

Stories of Sickness PDF

Author: Howard Brody

Publisher:

Published: 1987-01-01

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9780300039771

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Our personalities and our identities are intimately bound up with the stories that we tell to organize and to make sense of our lives. To understand the human meaning of illness, we therefore must turn to the stories we tell about illness, suffering, and medical care. Stories of Sickness explores the many dimensions of what illness means to the sufferers and to those around them, drawing on depictions of illness in great works of literature and in nonfiction accounts. The exploration is primarily philosophical but incorporates approaches from literature and from the medical social sciences. When it was first published in 1987, Stories of Sickness helped to inaugurate a renewed interest in the importance of narrative studies in health care. For the Second Edition the text has been thoroughly revised and significantly expanded. Four almost entirely new chapters have been added on the nature, complexities, and rigor of narrative ethics and how it is carried out. There is also an additional chapter on maladaptive ways of being sick that deals in greater depth with disability issues. Health care professionals, students of medicine and bioethics, and ordinary people coping with illness, no less than scholars in the health care humanities and social sciences, will find much value in this volume.

Representing Illness

Representing Illness PDF

Author: Wing-Kit Vicky Yau

Publisher: Open Dissertation Press

Published: 2017-01-27

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781374677777

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This dissertation, "Representing Illness: Patients, Monsters, and Microbes" by Wing-kit, Vicky, Yau, 邱穎潔, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled Representing Illness: Patients, Monsters, and Microbes submitted by YAU Wing Kit Vicky for the degree of Master of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in February 2007 Language and visual images are two primary forms of cultural representation in our society today, and it is through representation that meanings are produced. The objective of this thesis is to examine the ways in which illness is represented culturally. For this purpose, a selection of illness narratives and films is used to illustrate how illness is not simply a manifestation of symptoms as defined in medical terms but a socially and culturally constructed experience, and hence, the representation of illness is always more than a one-sided personal story about what it feels like to be ill. This thesis is divided into three main parts, namely Patients, Monsters and Microbes. Each section aims to deal with the representation of illness from one particular perspective so that by looking at the respective texts, it becomes clear how i) the voice of the patient is re-claimed; ii) the collective sentiment is properly expressed/purged by depicting the diseased as monsters/killers, and iii) the representation of the 'other' as a health threat is re-configured. Chapter 1 is an examination of the use of autopathographies, a subgenre of autobiography, by women who have suffered from breast cancer. It shows how patients use their own illness narrative to re-claim the voice for their bodies that have been objectified, cut open and scarred. Chapter 2 turns to filmic representation to see how illness is related to both the private spaces inside our body and the public spaces of the city. For this chapter, visual representation of infectious disease illustrates the impact of an epidemic on the city space and how it is a reflection of the crises that are still fresh in our memories. Chapter 3 is an analysis of the emergence of new illnesses and it aims to assess how far we have come from using language and visual imaging to help us express and see, respectively, to being used against us in the form of a new discourse that keeps us constantly vigilant. 'Health' and 'illness' should not be understood as mutually exclusive of each other. Moreover, they are invariably tied in with technology, science and the environment which, in turn, will affect the way we understand our own (suffering) body and what illness is. I hope that by taking illness in its various forms of cultural representation, its meaning will go beyond the realm of medicine and personal experience, and becomes a new site for engaging in new forms of understanding. Word Count: 407 DOI: 10.5353/th_b3786726 Subjects: Discourse analysis, Narrative Diseases - Social aspects

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine PDF

Author: Emily K. Abel

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0813539013

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The history of medicine is much more than the story of doctors, nurses, and hospitals. Seeking to understand the patient's perspective, historians scour the archives, searching for rare personal accounts. Bringing together a trove of more than 400 family letters by Charles Dwight Willard, Suffering in the Land of Sunshine provides a unique window into the experience of sickness. A Los Angeles civic leader at the turn of the twentieth century, Willard is well known to historians of the West, but exclusively for his public life as a booster and reformer. Willard's evocative story offers fresh insights into several critical issues, including how concepts of gender, class, and race shape patients' representations of their illness, how expectations of cure affect the illness experience, how different cultures constrain the coping strategies of the sick, and why robust health is such an exalted value in certain societies.