Author: Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004656421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 128
Book Description
The Shift
Author: Theresa BrownPublisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616206020
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
Practicing nurse and New York Times columnist Theresa Brown invites us to experience not just a day in the life of a nurse but all the life that happens in just one day on a busy teaching hospital’s cancer ward. In the span of twelve hours, lives can be lost, life-altering treatment decisions made, and dreams fulfilled or irrevocably stolen. Unfolding in real time--under the watchful eyes of this dedicated professional and insightful chronicler of events--The Shift gives an unprecedented view into the individual struggles as well as the larger truths about medicine in this country. By shift’s end, we have witnessed something profound about hope and humanity.
Malady and Mortality
Author: Helen ThomasPublisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443896551
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
This ground-breaking study examines visual and literary responses to, and representations of, illness, dying and death from the perspective of the chronically ill, their families and carers, medics, artists, photographers, authors, and academics. It encourages a re-examination of cultural taboos and visual and literary practices that engage with illness and death. Focusing upon a wide range of creative and critical engagements, this book makes a significant contribution to the medical humanities via its exploration of medical practice, literature and film, digital media studies, graphic design, and both contemporary and historical attitudes towards illness, death (including infant mortality), mourning and bereavement. For some, the experience of illness provokes feelings of exile, crisis or social critique, whilst for others it instigates utopian discourses predicated upon personal reflection, communication or connectivity, wherein the “self” is redefined beyond the parameters and constraints of the “body”.
Stories of Sickness
Author: Howard BrodyPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199759790
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Book Description
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. Unique Features: *Philosophically sophisticated yet clearly written and easily accessible *Interdisciplinary approach--combines philosophy, literature, health care, social sciences *Contains many fascinating stories and vignettes of illness drawn from both fiction and nonfiction *A new and comprehensive overview of the "hot topic" of narrative ethics in medicine and health care
Consumption and Literature
Author: C. LawlorPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230625746
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Book Description
This book seeks to explain how consumption - a horrible disease - came to be the glamorous and artistic Romantic malady. It tries to explain the disparity between literary myth and bodily reality, by examining literature and medicine from the Renaissance to the late Victorian period, covering a wide range of authors and characters.
On Being Ill
Author: Virginia WoolfPublisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819580910
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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
Illness as Metaphor
Author: Susan SontagPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cancer
Languages : en
Pages : 100
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.
Literature and Sickness
Author: Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004656421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 128
Book Description
Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction
Author: Heather HouserPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231165145
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Book Description
The 1970s brought a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impact of environmental crises on human beings, and as efforts to prevent ecological and human degradation aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. “Ecosickness fiction” imaginatively rethinks the link between ecological and bodily endangerment and uses affect and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness. Tracing the development of ecosickness through a compelling archive of modern U.S. novels and memoirs, this study demonstrates the mode’s crucial role in shaping thematic content and formal and affective literary strategies. Examining works by David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marge Piercy, Jan Zita Grover, and David Wojnarowicz, Heather Houser shows how these authors unite experiences of environmental and somatic damage through narrative affects that draw attention to ecological phenomena, organize perception, and convert knowledge into ethics. Traversing contemporary cultural studies, ecocriticism, affect studies, and literature and medicine, Houser juxtaposes ecosickness fiction against new forms of environmentalism and technoscientific innovations such as regenerative medicine and alternative ecosystems. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction recasts recent narrative as a laboratory in which affective and perceptual changes both support and challenge political projects.
Disease in the History of Modern Latin America
Author: Diego ArmusPublisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822384345
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
Challenging traditional approaches to medical history, Disease in the History of Modern Latin America advances understandings of disease as a social and cultural construction in Latin America. This innovative collection provides a vivid look at the latest research in the cultural history of medicine through insightful essays about how disease—whether it be cholera or aids, leprosy or mental illness—was experienced and managed in different Latin American countries and regions, at different times from the late nineteenth century to the present. Based on the idea that the meanings of sickness—and health—are contestable and subject to controversy, Disease in the History of Modern Latin America displays the richness of an interdisciplinary approach to social and cultural history. Examining diseases in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, the contributors explore the production of scientific knowledge, literary metaphors for illness, domestic public health efforts, and initiatives shaped by the agendas of international agencies. They also analyze the connections between ideas of sexuality, disease, nation, and modernity; the instrumental role of certain illnesses in state-building processes; welfare efforts sponsored by the state and led by the medical professions; and the boundaries between individual and state responsibilities regarding sickness and health. Diego Armus’s introduction contextualizes the essays within the history of medicine, the history of public health, and the sociocultural history of disease. Contributors. Diego Armus, Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Kathleen Elaine Bliss, Ann S. Blum, Marilia Coutinho, Marcus Cueto, Patrick Larvie, Gabriela Nouzeilles, Diana Obregón, Nancy Lays Stepan, Ann Zulawski
Madness and Literature
Author: Lasse R. GammelgaardPublisher: University of Exeter Press
ISBN: 1905816391
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
Mental illness has been a favourite topic for authors throughout the history of literature, while psychologists and psychiatrists such as Sigmund Freud and Karl Jaspers have in turn been interested in and influenced by literature. Pioneers within philosophy, psychiatry and literature share the endeavour to explore and explain the human mind and behaviour, including what a society deems as being outside perceived normality. Using a theoretical approach that is eclectic and transdisciplinary, this volume engages with literature’s multifarious ways of probing minds and bodies in a state of mental ill health. The cases and the theory are in dialogue with a clinical approach, addressing issues and diagnoses such as trauma, psychosis, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, self-harm, hoarding disorder, PTSD and Digital Sexual Assault. The chapters in Part I address literary representations of madness with a historical awareness, outlining the socio-political potentials of madness literature. Part II investigates how representations of mental illness in literature can offer unique insights into the subjective experience of alternative states of mind. Part III reflects on how literary cases can be applied to help inform mental health education, how they can be used therapeutically and how they are giving credence to new diagnoses. Throughout the book, the contributors consider how the language and discourses of literature—both stylistically and theoretically—can teach us something new about what it means to be mentally unwell.