Reconstructing Illness

Reconstructing Illness PDF Author: Anne Hunsaker Hawkins
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9781557531261
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
Serious illness and mortality, those most universal, unavoidable, and frightening of human experiences, are the focus of this pioneering study which has been hailed as a telling and provocative commentary on our times. As modern medicine has become more scientific and dispassionate, a new literary genre has emerged: pathography, the personal narrative concerning illness, treatment, and sometimes death. Hawkins's sensitive reading of numerous pathographies highlights the assumptions, attitudes, and myths that people bring to the medical encounter. One factor emerges again and again in these case studies: the tendency in contemporary medical practice to focus primarily not on the needs of the individual who is sick but on the condition that we call disease. Pathography allows the individual person a voice-one that asserts the importance of the experiential side of illness, and thus restores the feeling, thinking, experiencing human being to the center of the medical enterprise. Recommended for medical practitioners, the clergy, caregivers, students of popular culture, and the general reader, Reconstructing Illness demonstrates that only when we hear both the doctor's and the patient's voice will we have a medicine that is truly human.

Reconstructing Illness

Reconstructing Illness PDF Author: Anne Hunsaker Hawkins
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9781557531261
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
Serious illness and mortality, those most universal, unavoidable, and frightening of human experiences, are the focus of this pioneering study which has been hailed as a telling and provocative commentary on our times. As modern medicine has become more scientific and dispassionate, a new literary genre has emerged: pathography, the personal narrative concerning illness, treatment, and sometimes death. Hawkins's sensitive reading of numerous pathographies highlights the assumptions, attitudes, and myths that people bring to the medical encounter. One factor emerges again and again in these case studies: the tendency in contemporary medical practice to focus primarily not on the needs of the individual who is sick but on the condition that we call disease. Pathography allows the individual person a voice-one that asserts the importance of the experiential side of illness, and thus restores the feeling, thinking, experiencing human being to the center of the medical enterprise. Recommended for medical practitioners, the clergy, caregivers, students of popular culture, and the general reader, Reconstructing Illness demonstrates that only when we hear both the doctor's and the patient's voice will we have a medicine that is truly human.

Sick from Freedom

Sick from Freedom PDF Author: Jim Downs
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199758727
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sick from Freedom provides the first study of the health conditions of emancipated slaves and reveals the epidemics, illnesses, and poverty that former slaves suffered from when slavery ended and freedom began.

A History of English Autobiography

A History of English Autobiography PDF Author: Adam Smyth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107078415
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 455

Get Book Here

Book Description
This History explores the genealogy of autobiographical writing in England from the medieval period to the digital era.

The Poetics of Palliation

The Poetics of Palliation PDF Author: Brittany Pladek
Publisher:
ISBN: 1786942216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Poetics of Palliation argues that Romanticism developed richer literary therapies than its contemporary reception remembers. By reading Romantic writers against Georgian medical ethics, Poetics recovers their models of literature as comfort and sustenance, challenging a health humanities tradition that sees literary therapy primarily as cure.

American Life Writing and the Medical Humanities

American Life Writing and the Medical Humanities PDF Author: Samantha Allen Wright
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1839096748
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
American Life Writing and the Medical Humanities: Writing Contagion bridges a gap in the market by linking the medical humanities with disability studies. It examines how Americans used life writing to record epidemic disease throughout history.

The Spanish Flu

The Spanish Flu PDF Author: R. Davis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137339217
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Get Book Here

Book Description
The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic is now widely recognized as the most devastating disease outbreak in recorded history. This cultural history reconstructs Spaniards' experience of the flu and traces the emergence of various competing narratives that arose in response to bacteriology's failure to explain and contain the disease's spread.

The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer: On Writing Illnesses and Illnesses in Writing

The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer: On Writing Illnesses and Illnesses in Writing PDF Author: Jayjit Sarkar
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 164889271X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book Here

Book Description
Focusing on the various intersections between illness and literature across time and space, The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer seeks to understand how ontological, phenomenological and epistemological experiences of illness have been dealt with and represented in literary writings and literary studies. In this volume, scholars from across the world have come together to understand how the pathological condition of being ill (the sufferers), as well as the pathologists dealing with the ill (the healers and caregivers), have shaped literary works. The language of medical science, with its jargon, and the language of the every day, with its emphasis on utility, prove equally insufficient and futile in capturing the pain and suffering of illness. It is this insufficiency and futility that makes us turn towards the canonical works of Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, Kazuo Ishiguro, Miroslav Holub as well as the non-canonical António Lobo Antunes, Yumemakura Baku, Wopko Jensma and Vaslav Nijinsky. This volume helps in understanding and capturing the metalanguage of illness while presenting us with the tradition of ‘writing pain’. In an effort to expand the definition of pathography to include those who are on the other side of pain, the essays in this collection aim to portray the above-mentioned pathographers as artists, turning the anxiety and suffering of illness into an art form. Looking deeply into such creative aspects of illness, this book also seeks to evoke the possibility of pathography as world literature. This book will be of particular interest to undergraduate, postgraduate and research students, as well as scholars of literature and medical humanities who are interested in the intersections between literary studies and medical science.

Eating Disorders in Contemporary French Women’s Writing

Eating Disorders in Contemporary French Women’s Writing PDF Author: Lucille Cairns
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1802076484
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Eating Disorders in Contemporary French Women’s Writing examines the most common types of Eating Disorders (EDs) - anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa/bulimarexia, and binge eating disorder - as represented in contemporary French women’s literature. The primary corpus comprises 40 autobiographical (and very occasionally autofictional) texts complemented by ample reference, and sometimes challenge, to clinical, medically-researched based, or theoretical publications on EDs.

Pain as Human Experience

Pain as Human Experience PDF Author: Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520075122
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
"With case studies drawn from anthropological investigations of chronic pain sufferers and pain clinics in the northeastern United States, the authors attempt to invent new ways of writing about this language-resistant human experience. Focused on substantive issues in the study of chronic pain, their work explores the great divide between the culturally shaped language of suffering and the traditional language of medical and psychological theorizing. They argue that the representation of experience in local social worlds is a central challenge to the human sciences and to ethnographic writing, and that meeting that challenge is also crucial to the refiguring of pain in medical discourse and health policy debates. Anthropologists, scholars from the medical social sciences and humanities, and many general readers will be interested in Pain as Human Experience. In addition, behavioral medicine and pain specialists, psychiatrists, and primary care practitioners will find much that is relevant to their work in this book."--Jacket.

Identity and Form in Contemporary Literature

Identity and Form in Contemporary Literature PDF Author: Ana María Sánchez-Arce
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136758070
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
This ambitious and wide-ranging essay collection analyses how identity and form intersect in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. It revises and deconstructs the binary oppositions identity-form, content-form and body-mind through discussions of the role of the author in the interpretation of literary texts, the ways in which writers bypass or embrace identity politics and the function of identity and the body in form. Essays tackle these issues from a number of positions, including identity categories such as (dis)ability, gender, race and sexuality, as well as questioning these categories themselves. Essayists look at both identity as form and form as identity. Although identity and form are both staples of current research on contemporary literature, they rarely meet in the way this collection allows. Authors studied include Beryl Bainbridge, Samuel Beckett, John Berryman, Brigid Brophy, Angela Carter, J.M. Coetzee, Anne Enright, William Faulkner, Mark Haddon, Ted Hughes, Kazuo Ishiguro, B.S. Johnson, A.L. Kennedy, Toby Litt, Hilary Mantel, Andrea Levy, Robert Lowell, Ian McEwan, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Oswald, Sylvia Plath, Jeremy Reed, Anne Sexton, Edith Sitwell, Wallace Stevens, Jeremy Reed, Jeanette Winterson and Virginia Woolf. The book engages with key theoretical approaches to twentieth- and twenty-first century literature of the last twenty years while at the same time advancing new frameworks that enable readers to reconsider the identity and form conundrum. In both its choice of texts and diverse approaches, it will be of interest to those working on English and American Literatures, gender studies, queer studies, disability studies, postcolonial literature, and literature and philosophy.