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

This is the story of a professor of Medical Sociology, diagnosed with colon cancer. He undergoes the appropriate medical treatment. Passing through that trajectory, he realizes that things happen that he never read about in the professional literature. During his illness and rehabilitation he scribbles down notes about what is happening to him, what he is observing and what things do not tally with his knowledge of the sociological literature. This continuous connection of personal experience with academic literature is what makes this book such a powerful account of the ‘everyday’ life of a sick person. Recommended to teachers and students in the field of social health research; to everyone who works in health care, professionals as well as volunteers; and to men and women who themselves are experiencing a serious illness.

Communicating to Manage Health and Illness is a valuable resource for those in the field of health and interpersonal communication, public health, medicine, and related health disciplines. This scholarly edited volume advances the theoretical bases of health communication in two key areas: 1) communication, identity, and relationships; and 2) health care provider patient interaction. Chapters aim to underscore the theory that communication processes are a link between personal, social, cultural, and institutional factors and various facets of health and illness. Contributors to the work are respected scholars from the fields of communication, public health, medicine nursing, psychology, and other areas, and focus on ways in which patient identity is communicated in health-related interactions. This book serves as an excellent reference tool and is a substantial addition to health communication literature.

The author's 46 interviews with the families of children with chronic illness give an understanding of how the children comprehend their illnesses and how parents struggle daily to care for their kids while trying to give them a 'normal' childhood.

With rapid economic progress and increasing life expectancy in East Asian societies, more attention is being paid by their governments, the media and the academy to mental illness and dementia. While clinical research on mental illness and dementia in Chinese societies acknowledges the importance of culture in shaping people’s experiences of these illnesses, how Chinese culture shapes people’s understandings of and responses to mental illness and dementia has yet to be interrogated to any depth. Mental Illness, Dementia and Family in China breaks new ground in exploring how Chinese culture, namely, the understandings, norms, values and scripts that people acquire through being members of a Chinese community, shapes contemporary stories of mental illness, dementia and family care-giving. This book is innovative in examining and comparing stories which have been drawn from both real life (‘life stories’), as well as from film and television productions (‘filmic stories’). These two forms effectively complement each other, with life stories generally presenting an ‘insider’s’ account and filmic stories generally presenting an ‘outsider’s’ account. What remains unvoiced in one kind of story may be voiced in the other kind. Drawing on the perspectives and analytic approaches of narrative analysis and cultural studies, Guy Ramsay uncovers culturally-shaped continuities and departures in representations of time, identity and cause of illness as well as in the language employed in contemporary stories of mental illness, dementia and family care-giving in China. This book will be invaluable to students and scholars working on Chinese cultural studies and Asian social policy, as well as those interested in psychiatry, mental health and disability studies more broadly.

What do the gospels contribute to our understanding of nonviolent versus violent means of conflict resolution? Many biblical scholars contend that the gospels have little to say on this subject. Others seek answers in ethical principles found in Jesus's teachings, which may or may not be interpreted as accepting or rejecting violence. In Nonviolent Story Robert Beck proposes a new way of reading the Gospel of Mark, one that points to a challenging message of nonviolent resistance as reflected in the story of Jesus's life and ministry. According to narrative analysis, the message of the Gospel is found in the structure of the story itself. Beck contends that the narrative form of Mark's gospel portrays Jesus as a protagonist who does not avoid conflict, but enters into it without himself resorting to violence. He thus serves as a model of the nonviolent resistance that inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. By using literary analysis to explore Mark's gospel, Beck opens up a "counter-story" that challenges the prevailing American cultural myth of "constructive violence." Beck uses the Western tales of Louis L'Amour as the narrative essence of this pop mythology--and the total opposite of the story told by Mark.