On Being Ill

On Being Ill PDF Author: Virginia Woolf
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819580910
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Virginia Woolf’s daring essay on how illness transforms our perception, plus an essay by Woolf’s mother from the caregiver’s perspective: “Revelatory.” —Booklist This new publication of “On Being Ill” with “Notes from Sick Rooms” presents Virginia Woolf and her mother, Julia Stephen, in textual conversation for the first time in literary history. In the poignant and humorous essay “On Being Ill,” Woolf observes that though illness is part of every human being’s experience, it is not celebrated as a subject of great literature in the way that love and war are embraced by writers and readers. We must, Woolf says, invent a new language to describe pain. Illness, she observes, enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness; it is “the great confessional.” Woolf discusses the taboos associated with illness, and she explores how it changes our relationship to the world around us. “Notes from Sick Rooms,” meanwhile, addresses illness from the caregiver’s perspective. With clarity, humor, and pathos, Julia Stephen offers concrete information that remains useful to nurses and caregivers today. This edition also includes an introduction to “Notes from Sick Rooms” by Mark Hussey, founding editor of Woolf Studies Annual, and a poignant afterword by Rita Charon, MD, founder of the field of Narrative Medicine. In addition, Hermione Lee’s brilliant introduction to “On Being Ill” offers a superb overview of Woolf’s life and writing. “Woolf’s inquiry into illness and its impact on the mind is paired with her mother’s observations about caring for the body. Julia Stephen . . . had no professional training but took to heart Florence Nightingale’s precept that every woman is a nurse and emulated Nightingale’s best-selling Notes on Nursing with her own “Notes from Sick Rooms.” In this long-overlooked, precise, and piquant little manual, Stephen is compassionate and ironic, observing that everyone deserves to be tenderly nursed while addressing the small evil of crumbs in bed. This unprecedented literary reunion of mother and daughter is stunning on many fronts, but physician and literary scholar Rita Charon focuses on the essentials in her astute afterword, writing that Woolf’s perspective as a patient and Stephen’s as a nurse together illuminate the goal of care—to listen, to recognize, to imagine, to honor.” —Booklist “Woolf and Stephen will certainly change the way readers think of illness.” —Publishers Weekly

On Being Ill

On Being Ill PDF Author: Virginia Woolf
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819580910
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Get Book Here

Book Description
Virginia Woolf’s daring essay on how illness transforms our perception, plus an essay by Woolf’s mother from the caregiver’s perspective: “Revelatory.” —Booklist This new publication of “On Being Ill” with “Notes from Sick Rooms” presents Virginia Woolf and her mother, Julia Stephen, in textual conversation for the first time in literary history. In the poignant and humorous essay “On Being Ill,” Woolf observes that though illness is part of every human being’s experience, it is not celebrated as a subject of great literature in the way that love and war are embraced by writers and readers. We must, Woolf says, invent a new language to describe pain. Illness, she observes, enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness; it is “the great confessional.” Woolf discusses the taboos associated with illness, and she explores how it changes our relationship to the world around us. “Notes from Sick Rooms,” meanwhile, addresses illness from the caregiver’s perspective. With clarity, humor, and pathos, Julia Stephen offers concrete information that remains useful to nurses and caregivers today. This edition also includes an introduction to “Notes from Sick Rooms” by Mark Hussey, founding editor of Woolf Studies Annual, and a poignant afterword by Rita Charon, MD, founder of the field of Narrative Medicine. In addition, Hermione Lee’s brilliant introduction to “On Being Ill” offers a superb overview of Woolf’s life and writing. “Woolf’s inquiry into illness and its impact on the mind is paired with her mother’s observations about caring for the body. Julia Stephen . . . had no professional training but took to heart Florence Nightingale’s precept that every woman is a nurse and emulated Nightingale’s best-selling Notes on Nursing with her own “Notes from Sick Rooms.” In this long-overlooked, precise, and piquant little manual, Stephen is compassionate and ironic, observing that everyone deserves to be tenderly nursed while addressing the small evil of crumbs in bed. This unprecedented literary reunion of mother and daughter is stunning on many fronts, but physician and literary scholar Rita Charon focuses on the essentials in her astute afterword, writing that Woolf’s perspective as a patient and Stephen’s as a nurse together illuminate the goal of care—to listen, to recognize, to imagine, to honor.” —Booklist “Woolf and Stephen will certainly change the way readers think of illness.” —Publishers Weekly

How to Be Sick

How to Be Sick PDF Author: Toni Bernhard
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0861719263
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This life-affirming, instructive, and thoroughly inspiring book is a must-read for anyone who is - or who might one day be - sick. It can also be the perfect gift of guidance, encouragement, and uplifting inspiration to family, friends, and loved ones struggling with the many terrifying or disheartening life changes that come so close on the heels of a diagnosis of a chronic condition or life-threatening illness. Authentic and graceful, How to be Sick reminds us of our limitless inner freedom, even under high degrees of suffering and pain. The author - who became ill while a university law professor in the prime of her career - tells the reader how she got sick and, to her and her partner's bewilderment, stayed that way. Toni had been a longtime meditator, going on long meditation retreats and spending many hours rigorously practicing, but soon discovered that she simply could no longer engage in those difficult and taxing forms. She had to learn ways to make "being sick" the heart of her spiritual practice - and through truly learning how to be sick, she learned how, even with many physical and energetic limitations, to live a life of equanimity, compassion, and joy. And whether we ourselves are ill or not, we can learn these vital arts from Bernhard's generous wisdom in How to Be Sick.

Dying to be Ill

Dying to be Ill PDF Author: Marc D. Feldman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351663534
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
Most of us can recall a time when we pretended to be sick to reap the benefits that go along with illness. By playing sick, we gained sympathy, care, and attention, and were excused from our responsibilities. Though doing so on occasion is considered normal, there are those who carry their deceptions to the extreme. In this book, Dr. Marc Feldman describes people’s strange motivations to fabricate or induce illness or injury to satisfy deep emotional needs. Doctors, family members, and friends are lured into a costly, frustrating, and potentially deadly web of deceit. From the mother who shaves her child’s head and tells her community he has cancer, to the co-worker who suffers from a string of incomprehensible "tragedies," to the false epilepsy victim who monopolizes her online support group, "disease forgery" is ever-present in the media and in many people’s lives. In Dying to be Ill: True Stories of Medical Deception, Dr. Feldman, with the assistance of Gregory Yates, has chronicled this fascinating world as well as the paths to healing. With insight developed from 25 years of hands-on experience, Dying to be Ill is sure to stand as a classic in the field.

Ill Feelings

Ill Feelings PDF Author: Alice Hattrick
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558614133
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
An intrepid, galvanizing meditation on illness, disability, feminism, and what it means to be alive. In 1995 Alice’s mother collapsed with pneumonia. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Their symptoms mirrored their mother’s and appeared to have no physical cause; they received the same diagnosis a few years later. Ill Feelings blends memoir, medical history, biography and literary nonfiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters. Their cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin’s lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois and the nurse Florence Nightingale. Suffused with a generative, transcendent rage, Alice Hattrick’s genre-bending debut is a moving and defiant exploration of life with a medically unexplained illness.

Being Well when We're Ill

Being Well when We're Ill PDF Author: Marva J. Dawn
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Pub
ISBN: 0806680385
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Offers advice to those coping with illness or a disability, providing spiritual and practical suggestions for coping with such aspects of illness as physical pain, regrets, bitterness, and loneliness.

The Art of Being Ill

The Art of Being Ill PDF Author: Jill Sinclair
Publisher: Cargo Publishing
ISBN: 1908754842
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
Have you ever worried that you're doing a poor job of feeling poorly? Have you despaired that you're failing in your ailing? Have you felt you're missing out on TLC? You're not alone - it seems that most people these days just don't know how to make the most of being ill. In a society where there is a pill to cure more or less everything, this how-to guide will teach readers about the subtle art of being an invalid. It covers age-old remedies for common maladies, all but forgotten treatments, and the vital preparations that should be made to make being bed-ridden as comfortable and productive as possible. From the team that created the UK Booksellers Association Top 5 Christmas book, 101 Uses of a Dead Kindle, and Amazon bestseller, In Rude Health, The Art of Being Ill is at times practical, at times hilarious - but always an honest instruction manual for those who are truly terrible at being ill.

Finding Freedom in Illness

Finding Freedom in Illness PDF Author: Peter Fernando
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 1611802636
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Buddhist wisdom for finding freedom and insight through spiritual practice in the midst of illness and pain. "Let your illness be your spiritual teacher!" Make a statement like that to someone who's struggled for years with, say, rheumatoid arthritis, and be prepared for an eyeroll (at best). To Peter Fernando's credit, he makes that statement, and no such impulse arises. We believe him because he's been there himself and because he backs up the statements with his own real experiences and with real wisdom from the Buddhist teachings. Peter starts by defusing the pernicious belief that anyone is somehow responsible for their illness: You're not "wrong" for being sick. Then, having gotten past self-blame, one can begin to learn self-kindness. From there, one moves to mindfulness practices and cultivating body awareness--even if body awareness is distasteful when the body isn't behaving the way you like. Further topics include getting intimate with dark emotions (fear, despair, the scary future, frustration, grief, etc.), learning equanimity (rejoicing in the good fortune of those who don't share your suffering), cultivating healthy relationships in the midst of everything, and practical advice for living with pain. Each chapter comes with one or more practices or guided meditations for putting the teachings into practice.

How We Do Harm

How We Do Harm PDF Author: Otis Webb Brawley, MD
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429941502
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
How We Do Harm exposes the underbelly of healthcare today—the overtreatment of the rich, the under treatment of the poor, the financial conflicts of interest that determine the care that physicians' provide, insurance companies that don't demand the best (or even the least expensive) care, and pharmaceutical companies concerned with selling drugs, regardless of whether they improve health or do harm. Dr. Otis Brawley is the chief medical and scientific officer of The American Cancer Society, an oncologist with a dazzling clinical, research, and policy career. How We Do Harm pulls back the curtain on how medicine is really practiced in America. Brawley tells of doctors who select treatment based on payment they will receive, rather than on demonstrated scientific results; hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that seek out patients to treat even if they are not actually ill (but as long as their insurance will pay); a public primed to swallow the latest pill, no matter the cost; and rising healthcare costs for unnecessary—and often unproven—treatments that we all pay for. Brawley calls for rational healthcare, healthcare drawn from results-based, scientifically justifiable treatments, and not just the peddling of hot new drugs. Brawley's personal history – from a childhood in the gang-ridden streets of black Detroit, to the green hallways of Grady Memorial Hospital, the largest public hospital in the U.S., to the boardrooms of The American Cancer Society—results in a passionate view of medicine and the politics of illness in America - and a deep understanding of healthcare today. How We Do Harm is his well-reasoned manifesto for change.

Illness as Metaphor

Illness as Metaphor PDF Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cancer
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
"In this penetrating analysis of the social attitudes toward various major illnesses - chiefly tuberculosis, the scourge of the 19th century, and cancer, the terror of our own - Susan Sontag demonstrates that "illness is not a metaphor" and shows why "the healthiest way of being ill is one purified of metaphoric thinking." Once tuberculosis was identified as a bacterial infection, it ceased to be a symbol of a romantic fading away or of a sensitive or artistic temperament, and it could be treated and cured. Similarly, we must today cease to think of cancer as a mark of doom, a punishment or a sign of a repressed personality, and recognize it for what it is: one disease among many and often receptive to treatment." -- from back cover.

The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction

The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction PDF Author: Miriam Bailin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521036405
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The cultural and narrative significance of illness, nursing and the sickroom in Victorian literature.