Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography, Second Edition - Softcover

Hunsaker Hawkins, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557531269 ISBN 13: 9781557531261

Publisher: Purdue University Press, 1998

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Humanities; Director, The Doctors Kienle Center for Humanistic Medicine Ph.D., University of Rochester, 1978

Review

“Doctors may describe diseases and their effects from the outside; only patients can describe them from the inside. Such descriptions, which Anne Hunsaker Hawkins calls ‘pathographies,’ take the form of vivid personal accounts, often of journeys into a fearful realm of sickness. Reconstructing Illness is a beautifully written and profound consideration of the range of such pathographies, their organizing myths and metaphors, and the light they cast on what it means to be human in the face of illness.”

(Oliver Sacks)

“Anne Hunsaker Hawkins’s Reconstructing Illness is an intelligent and insightful consideration of what she characterizes as a new literary genre.”

Times Literary Supplement
(Times Literary Supplement)

“The book has earned an important place in courses on medical practices as well as courses treating any of the various relationships between story and healing and is accessible and engaging enough to be useful to all who struggle with serious illness.”

Medical Humanities Review
(Medical Humanities Review)

“Hawkins . . . argues convincingly that today’s 'pathographies’ are replacing the stories of religious conversion that were popular in earlier eras . . . The observations about contemporary culture and our feelings about death and illness are plausible and intriguing, and the writing is clear.”

Publishers Weekly
(Publishers Weekly)

Edition details

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1557531269
• ISBN 13: 9781557531261
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 289