Summary
Contents
Subject index
This timely and assured text provides lecturers and students with a well informed, penetrating analysis of the key questions in medicine and society. The book is divided into three sections. It opens with a well judged account of the context of health and illness. It moves on to examine the process and experience of illness. Finally, it examines how health care is negotiated and delivered.
Experiencing Illness
Experiencing Illness
Chapter Summary
This chapter describes:
- how illness is laden with meaning, much of which cannot be addressed by medical science;
- how questions of order and control of the onset of suffering are urgent for patients;
- how illness can mean failure and be experienced as a stigmatized state;
- how biographical disruption, failure and stigma are addressed through the construction of illness narratives.
Useful Terms for this Chapter
autopathography: a term coined for written accounts of the experience of serious illness
biographical disruption: the disruption between one's former healthy self with the current ill self brought about by the experience of illness
sick role: a reciprocal, unequal set of rights and obligations that structure doctors' and patients' behaviour and expectations
stigma: a condition or attribute that marks the bearer as ...
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