The Language of Illness

The Language of Illness PDF Author: Fergus Shanahan
Publisher: Liberties Press
ISBN: 1912589168
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
The practice of medicine has advanced dramatically in recent years, but the language used to discuss illness – by medical practitioners, patients and carers – has not kept pace. As a result, clinicians and, just as importantly, patients and their relatives and carers, are not able to communicate clearly in relation to illness. The upshot is misunderstanding and confusion on all sides. In this ground-breaking book, Dr Fergus Shanahan, an eminent gastroenterologist who has practised in Ireland, the United States and Canada, and published widely around the world, looks at memoirs of illness, and outlines the lessons we can learn from a better understanding of the words we use to describe illness. He looks at the ways in which language can act as a barrier with regard to illness, and proposes practical ways in which we can dismantle these barriers. The book is written for the general reader: as Dr Shanahan puts it himself, he is "enough of an expert to be wary of experts". The Language of Illness, part manifesto, part memoir, and part instruction manual, is an appeal for the use of clearer, more holistic language, by all those involved with, and affected by, illness. Like the great American poet-doctor William Carlos Williams, he aims to help us develop a new language by means of which we can develop a new way of living with illness – which is an integral part of the human condition. Put simply, it is a book for all those who care about caring.

The Language of Illness

The Language of Illness PDF Author: Fergus Shanahan
Publisher: Liberties Press
ISBN: 1912589168
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Get Book Here

Book Description
The practice of medicine has advanced dramatically in recent years, but the language used to discuss illness – by medical practitioners, patients and carers – has not kept pace. As a result, clinicians and, just as importantly, patients and their relatives and carers, are not able to communicate clearly in relation to illness. The upshot is misunderstanding and confusion on all sides. In this ground-breaking book, Dr Fergus Shanahan, an eminent gastroenterologist who has practised in Ireland, the United States and Canada, and published widely around the world, looks at memoirs of illness, and outlines the lessons we can learn from a better understanding of the words we use to describe illness. He looks at the ways in which language can act as a barrier with regard to illness, and proposes practical ways in which we can dismantle these barriers. The book is written for the general reader: as Dr Shanahan puts it himself, he is "enough of an expert to be wary of experts". The Language of Illness, part manifesto, part memoir, and part instruction manual, is an appeal for the use of clearer, more holistic language, by all those involved with, and affected by, illness. Like the great American poet-doctor William Carlos Williams, he aims to help us develop a new language by means of which we can develop a new way of living with illness – which is an integral part of the human condition. Put simply, it is a book for all those who care about caring.

Illness

Illness PDF Author: Havi Carel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131548739X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
What is illness? Is it a physiological dysfunction, a social label, or a way of experiencing the world? How do the physical, social and emotional worlds of a person change when they become ill? And can there be well-being within illness? In this remarkable and thought-provoking book, Havi Carel explores these questions by weaving together the personal story of her own serious illness with insights and reflections drawn from her work as a philosopher. Carel's fresh approach to illness raises some uncomfortable questions about how we all - whether healthcare professionals or not - view the ill and challenges us to become more thoughtful. 'Illness' unravels the tension between the universality of illness and its intensely private, often lonely, nature. It offers a new way of looking at a matter that affects every one of us.

Anatomy of an Illness As Perceived By the Patient

Anatomy of an Illness As Perceived By the Patient PDF Author: Norman Cousins
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393326840
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
The story of a recovery from a crippling disease and the physician patient partnership that beat the odds by using the patient's own capabilities.

Treatments

Treatments PDF Author: Lisa Diedrich
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452913048
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Creative expression inspired by disease has been criticized as a celebration of victimhood, unmediated personal experience, or just simply bad art. Despite debate, however, memoirs written about illness—particularly AIDS or cancer—have proliferated since the late twentieth century and occupy a highly influential place on the cultural landscape today. In Treatments, Lisa Diedrich considers illness narratives, demonstrating that these texts not only recount and interpret symptoms but also describe illness as an event that reflects wider cultural contexts, including race, gender, class, and sexuality. Diedrich begins this theoretically rigorous analysis by offering examples of midcentury memoirs of tuberculosis. She then looks at Susan Sontag’s Illness As Metaphor, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “White Glasses,” showing how these breast cancer survivors draw on feminist health practices of the 1970s and also anticipate the figure that would appear in the wake of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s—the “politicized patient.” She further reveals how narratives written by doctors Abraham Verghese and Rafael Campo about treating people with AIDS can disrupt the doctor–patient hierarchy, and she explores practices of witnessing that emerge in writing by Paul Monette and John Bayley. Through these records of intensely personal yet universal experience, Diedrich demonstrates how language both captures and fails to capture these “scenes of loss” and how illness narratives affect the literary, medical, and cultural contexts from which they arise. Finally, by examining the ways in which the sick speak and are spoken for, she argues for an ethics of failure—the revaluation of loss as creating new possibilities for how we live and die. Lisa Diedrich is assistant professor of women’s studies at Stony Brook University.

The End of Illness

The End of Illness PDF Author: David B. Agus
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451610173
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
From one of the world's foremost physicians and researchers comes a monumental work that radically redefines conventional conceptions of health and illness to offer new methods for living a long, healthy life.

Making Sense of Illness

Making Sense of Illness PDF Author: Robert A. Aronowitz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521558259
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This 1998 book contains historical essays about how diseases change their meaning.

The Body Language of Illness

The Body Language of Illness PDF Author: Eleanor Limmer
Publisher: Freedom Press (WA)
ISBN: 9780967818313
Category : Holistic medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
The Body language of Illness offers a clear, effective method of inquiry by which the mental, emotional, and spiritual messages of illness can be discovered, understood, and answered. This method of inquiry allows us to access and understand these messages ourselves, rather than having to depend upon prescribed lists of general meanings. Through this discovery, the meanings of illness can have a personal significance that can help heal us. Illnesses symbolize specific conflicts that can be recognized, understood, and healed.

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.

Illness as Many Narratives

Illness as Many Narratives PDF Author: Bolaki Stella Bolaki
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474402437
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Illness narratives have become a cultural phenomenon in the Western world. In what ways can they be seen to have aesthetic, ethical and political value? What do they reveal about experiences of illness, the relationship between the body and identity and the role of the arts in bearing witness to illness for people who are ill and those connected to them? How can they influence medicine, the arts and shape public understandings of health and illness? These questions and more are explored in Illness as Many Narratives, which contains readings of a rich array of representations of illness from the 1980s to the present. A wide range of arts and media are considered such as life writing, photography, performance, film, theatre, artists' books and animation. The individual chapters deploy multidisciplinary critical frameworks and discuss physical and mental illness. Through reading this book you will gain an understanding of the complex contribution illness narratives make to contemporary culture and the emergent field of Critical Medical Humanities.

Illness and Healing

Illness and Healing PDF Author: Judith von Halle
Publisher: Temple Lodge Publishing
ISBN: 1902636988
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
"The contents of this volume have arisen from my own spiritual experience, and do not represent any kind of hypothesis or speculation, except where I expressly say that I am unable to make any definitive statement about a particular event or set of circumstances." --Judith von Halle After she received the stigmata, Judith von Halle began vividly to perceive the events that occurred at the time of Christ. These continuing experiences are not visions, but rather actual participation, involving all human senses, in the events themselves. To complement this personal witnessing of Christ's life, von Halle has researched the facts using spiritual-scientific methods, based on the human "I" crossing of the spiritual threshold while fully conscious. Here she explores here, in her continuing series 'Approaches to Understanding the Christ Event', the nature of illnesses at the time of Christ, as described in the Gospels, and how he approached the process of healing them. The Gospels conceal untapped treasures that can be brought to light only by deciphering their inherently pictorial language. By developing a spiritual-scientific mode of thinking, we can create the foundation for examining the causes and cures of illness. The author explains the meaning of certain phrases and passages in the Gospels, translating them from their metaphorical form into modern language. She also reveals why illnesses at the time of Christ were different from medical disorders of today and looks into the nature and causes of modern illnesses.