Stories of Sickness - Softcover

Brody, Howard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195151402 ISBN 13: 9780195151404

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2002

Synopsis

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 non-fiction 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 of 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

About this title

About the Author

Howard Brody received his M.D. and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Michigan State University and completed a residency in Family Practice at the University of Virginia. He has been on the faculty at Michigan State University since 1980, serving as Director of the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences at Michigan State University from 1985 to 2000.

Review

From reviews of the first edition:
"[Brody] shows us how literary criticism and social sciences can be applied to the tales of illness that doctors and patients tell one another....This rational, compassionate book should serve as a splendid text for courses in the medical humanities as they are now taught in medical schools....A pleasure to read."--Gerald Weissmann, MD, New York Times Book Review

"...a scholarly and weighty addition to the growing field of what might be called 'narrative based medicine'..." -Triple Helix

"A detailed, internally consistent philosophy of illness that can structure clinicians' observations and understanding of their patients' unique stories."--Anthony L. Suchman, M.D., Annals of Internal Medicine

"Brody skillfully blends literature, philosophy, and medicine in this volume to illustrate the concept of sickness and its effect upon the person....This book contains remarkable contributions to our philosophical and clinical understanding of the relation between the healing process and the patient narrative."--Choice

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0195151402
• ISBN 13: 9780195151404
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 312