Journalist Max Lerner writes a stunningly honest account of the feelings and thoughts that marked his battle with two successive cancers and a heart attack. Journal entries from this extraordinary ordeal show how mind and body interweave in the healing process. "A worthy companion to Anatomy of an Illness." —Kirkus Reviews

Journalist Max Lerner writes a stunningly honest account of the feelings and thoughts that marked his battle with two successive cancers and a heart attack. Journal entries from this extraordinary ordeal show how mind and body interweave in the healing process. "A worthy companion to Anatomy of an Illness".--Kirkus Reviews.

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.

Originally published as: Illness and the limits of expression. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c2007.

An important addition to the literature of cancer by an award-winning scholar and memoirist. Elaborating upon her “Living with Cancer” column in the New York Times, Susan Gubar helps patients, caregivers, and the specialists who seek to serve them. In a book both enlightening and practical, she describes how the activities of reading and writing can right some of cancer’s wrongs. To stimulate the writing process, she proposes specific exercises, prompts, and models. In discussions of the diary of Fanny Burney, the stories of Leo Tolstoy and Alice Munro, numerous memoirs, novels, paintings, photographs, and blogs, Gubar shows how readers can learn from art that deepens our comprehension of what it means to live or die with the disease. From a writer whose own memoir, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, was described by the New York Times Book Review as “moving and instructive…and incredibly brave,” this volume opens a path to healing.

"Exploring what patients do want gives direction to the author's inquiry into what they should want. What patients want, he believes, is properly more complex and ambiguous than being "empowered." In this book he charts that ambiguity to take the autonomy principle past current pieties into the uncertain realities of the sick room and the hospital ward." "The Practice of Autonomy is a sympathetic but trenchant study of the animating principle of modern bioethics. It speaks with freshness, insight, and even passion to bioethicists and moral philosophers (about their theories), to lawyers (about their methods), to medical sociologists (about their subject), to policy-makers (about their ambitions), to doctors (about their work), and to patients (about their lives)."--BOOK JACKET.

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