Worlds of Illness: Biographical and Cultural Perspectives on Health and Disease

by Radley,Alan

• ISBN13: 9780415067690
• ISBN10: 0415067693
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1993-03-25
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The burden of sickness is having to live with it in the world of the healthy. Over the past 20 years the study of illness via the patient's experience has emerged as the dominant approach to understanding sickness and health in general. "Worlds of Illness" examines people's experience of illness, their understanding of what it means to be healthy, and illuminates the different worlds of the sick and the healthy. The contributors are the first to offer an approach which stresses the biographical and cultural contexts in which illness arises and how it is borne by patients and those who care for them. This book is an important contribution to ongoing debates in medical sociology and to health psychology at a time when it is emerging as an active area of research.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Constructing discourse about health and their social determinants

Social Class and the contextualization of illness experience

Attitude of mind as a means of resisting illness

Religion and Illness

Chronic illness and the pursuit of virtue in everyday life

The role of metaphor in adjustment to chronic illness

Why do the victims blame themselves?

Towards the reconstruction of an organic mental disorder

The world of illness of the closed head injured

On knowing the patient: experiences of nurses undertaking care

On chronic illness: immigrant women in Canada's workforce

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.