Malady and Mortality
Title | Malady and Mortality PDF eBook |
Author | Helen Thomas |
Publisher | Cambridge Scholars Publishing |
Pages | 351 |
Release | 2016-06-22 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1443896551 |
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”.
Mortality
Title | Mortality PDF eBook |
Author | Christopher Hitchens |
Publisher | Atlantic Books Ltd |
Pages | 84 |
Release | 2012-08-25 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0857897659 |
The world's greatest contrarian confronts his own death in this brave and unforgettable book. During the American book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest. As he would later write in the first of a series of deeply moving Vanity Fair pieces, he was being deported 'from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.' Over the next year he experienced the full force of modern cancer treatment. Mortality is at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this moving personal account of illness, Hitchens confronts his own death - and he is combative and dignified, eloquent and witty to the very last.
The Malady of Death
Title | The Malady of Death PDF eBook |
Author | Marguerite Duras |
Publisher | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
Pages | 21 |
Release | 2015-06-30 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0802190588 |
“[An] erotic, existential mystery . . . part philosophical meditation, part fantasy” from the Prix Goncourt-winning author of The Lover (The Guardian). A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. The woman is no one in particular, a “she,” a warm, moist body with a beating heart—the enigma of Other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn to love. It isn’t a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to try . . . This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, “perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe,” and its absence, “the malady of death.” “The whole tragedy of the inability to love is in this work, thanks to Duras’ unparalleled art of reinventing the most familiar words, of weighing their meaning.”—Le Monde “Deceptively simple and Racinian in its purity, condensed to the essential.”—Translation Review Praise for Marguerite Duras’s international bestseller, The Lover “Powerful, authentic, completely successful . . . perfect.”—The New York Times Book Review “An exquisite jewel of a novel, as multifaceted as a diamond, as seamless and polished as a pearl.”—Boston Herald “A vivid, lingering novel . . . a brilliant work of art.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer
Mortality
Title | Mortality PDF eBook |
Author | Christopher Hitchens |
Publisher | Twelve |
Pages | 60 |
Release | 2012-09-04 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 1455517828 |
On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis. Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. By turns personal and philosophical, Hitchens embraces the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of death. Mortality is the exemplary story of one man's refusal to cower in the face of the unknown, as well as a searching look at the human predicament. Crisp and vivid, veined throughout with penetrating intelligence, Hitchens's testament is a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man.
Medicine, Disease, and Death
Title | Medicine, Disease, and Death PDF eBook |
Author | Charles Elam |
Publisher | |
Pages | 112 |
Release | 1870 |
Genre | Medicine |
ISBN |
The Chances of Death and the Ministry of Health (Classic Reprint)
Title | The Chances of Death and the Ministry of Health (Classic Reprint) PDF eBook |
Author | Frederick L. Hoffman |
Publisher | Forgotten Books |
Pages | 24 |
Release | 2018-02-09 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 9780656165834 |
Excerpt from The Chances of Death and the Ministry of Health The present annual death rate of the United States is only per against a rate of in 1880. The saving in years of life in conse quence of a declining death rate is so enormous for a vast country like ours that the true meaning of statistical calculations can hardly be made intelligent to the average mind. Sooner or later every one must die, but the question is one of how long, on the average, each life can be made to last, when a gulf greater than the Atlantic or the Pacific separates the people who in one section live to an average age of 45 and in another to 60. Life tables illustrate with scientific precision God's law as applied to the tenure of man's existence on earth, but what is'called the law of mortality is rather a symbolic expression of the law which governs all collective phenomena in the order of logical sequence, without which human ex istence, and in fact all existence, would be chaos. A study of mortality problems reveals more accurately than many another branch of science the marvels of life in the aggregate as conditioned by the more or less perfect coordination of the units, whether merely physically considered or also in the broader sense of the psychological, moral and spiritual. The duration of life is determined by an almost infinite number of variants and even the wisest fail in the attempt to comprehend the whole. The diseases which afflict mankind are numerous, but most of the waste of life is due to a comparatively small number of causes, chiefly, in our own country, tuberculosis of the lungs, accounting for per cent. Of the whole; organic diseases of the heart accounting for per cent.; acute nephritis and Bright's disease, accounting for per cent.;pneumonia, accounting for per cent.; and cancer, accounting for per cent. These six causes alone are responsible for per cent. Of the entire mortality. Other diseases, now largely under control but intrinsically as serious a menace to community life as any of those men tioned, are typhoid fever, smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, etc. The typhoid death rate, which is typical of sanitary progress or neglect, has declined in American' cities from an average of 51 per of population during the decade ending with 1892 to 25, or just about one-half, during the decade ending with 1912; but our typhoid fever rate is still excessive and no cause of death perhaps illustrates better the lamentable amount of still existing municipal neglect. Tuberculosis, the foe of mankind for, ages, the disease par excellence, considered a visitation of, God, has, during the last generation, been brought within the range of human control, with a fair prospect that within a measurable period of time its ravages will be reduced still more than has been the case in the recent past. The tuberculosis death rate of American cities during the decade ending with 1882 was 318 per of population, but the rate during the last decade was only 182. Within more recent years the mortality from smallpox has been reduced from an average of during the five years ending with 1905 to a rate of only or about one-tenth of the earlier rate, during. The year 1912. The mortality from the dread diseases of infancy, diphtheria and croup, has been reduced from an average of during the five years ending with 1905 to during the year 1912. We have no deaths from Asiatic cholera, nor from plague, except at quarantine stations subject to Federal control; either they are isolated or their introduction into this country is practically made impossible by means - of a national health adminis tration which challenges the admiration of the world. Yellow fever is no longer the foe of southern states, and we have had practically no deaths from the disease since 1905. Of leprosy we have a few cases annually, but excepting the well known leper settlements in Louisiana, there is slight danger to the country of a recrudescence...
Being Mortal
Title | Being Mortal PDF eBook |
Author | Atul Gawande |
Publisher | |
Pages | 282 |
Release | 2014 |
Genre | Aging |
ISBN | 9781781253946 |
In Being Mortal, Gawande examines his experiences as a surgeon, as he confronts the realities of ageing and dying in his patients and in his family, as well as the limits of what he can do. And he emerges with story that crosses the globe and history, exploring questions that range from the curious to the profound: What happens to people's teeth as they get old? Did human beings really commit senecide, the sacrifice of the elderly? Why do the aged so dread nursing homes and hospitals? How should someone give another person the dreadful news that they will die? This is a story told only as Atul Gawande can - penetrating people's lives and also the systems that have evolved to govern our mortality. Those systems, he observes, routinely fail to serve - or even acknowledge - people's needs and priorities beyond mere survival. And the consequences are devastating lives, families, and even whole economies. But, as he reveals, it doesn't have to be this way. Atul Gawande has delivered an engrossing tale of science, history and remarkable characters in the vein of Oliver Sacks.