Sander L. Gilman, whose pioneering work on the history of stereotypes has become a model for scholars in many fields, here examines the images that society creates of disease and its victims.
How do individuals conceive illness and symptoms? Do their conceptions conflict with the physician's views of their illness, and what happens if they do? This book thoroughly explores the field of disease representation, describes and discusses lay illness models in a variety of social, histo- rical and cultural contexts.
Visual anatomy books have been a staple of medical practice and study since the mid-sixteenth century. But the visual representation of diseased states followed a very different pattern from anatomy, one we are only now beginning to investigate and understand. With Visualizing Disease, Domenico Bertoloni Meli explores key questions in this domain, opening a new field of inquiry based on the analysis of a rich body of arresting and intellectually challenging images reproduced here both in black and white and in color. Starting in the Renaissance, Bertoloni Meli delves into the wide range of figures involved in the early study and representation of disease, including not just men of medicine, like anatomists, physicians, surgeons, and pathologists, but also draftsmen and engravers. Pathological preparations proved difficult to preserve and represent, and as Bertoloni Meli takes us through a number of different cases from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, we gain a new understanding of how knowledge of disease, interactions among medical men and artists, and changes in the technologies of preservation and representation of specimens interacted to slowly bring illustration into the medical world.
Estimates indicate that as many as 1 in 4 Americans will experience a mental health problem or will misuse alcohol or drugs in their lifetimes. These disorders are among the most highly stigmatized health conditions in the United States, and they remain barriers to full participation in society in areas as basic as education, housing, and employment. Improving the lives of people with mental health and substance abuse disorders has been a priority in the United States for more than 50 years. The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 is considered a major turning point in America's efforts to improve behavioral healthcare. It ushered in an era of optimism and hope and laid the groundwork for the consumer movement and new models of recovery. The consumer movement gave voice to people with mental and substance use disorders and brought their perspectives and experience into national discussions about mental health. However over the same 50-year period, positive change in American public attitudes and beliefs about mental and substance use disorders has lagged behind these advances. Stigma is a complex social phenomenon based on a relationship between an attribute and a stereotype that assigns undesirable labels, qualities, and behaviors to a person with that attribute. Labeled individuals are then socially devalued, which leads to inequality and discrimination. This report contributes to national efforts to understand and change attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that can lead to stigma and discrimination. Changing stigma in a lasting way will require coordinated efforts, which are based on the best possible evidence, supported at the national level with multiyear funding, and planned and implemented by an effective coalition of representative stakeholders. Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders: The Evidence for Stigma Change explores stigma and discrimination faced by individuals with mental or substance use disorders and recommends effective strategies for reducing stigma and encouraging people to seek treatment and other supportive services. It offers a set of conclusions and recommendations about successful stigma change strategies and the research needed to inform and evaluate these efforts in the United States.
Lupton′s newest edition of Medicine as Culture is more relevant than ever. Trudy Rudge, Professor of Nursing, University of Sydney A welcome update of a text that has become a mainstay of the medical sociologist′s library. Alan Radley, Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology, Loughborough University Medicine as Culture introduces students to a broad range of cross-disciplinary theoretical perspectives, using examples that emphasize bodies and visual images. Lupton′s core contrast between lay perspectives on illness and medical power is a useful beginning point for courses teaching health and illness from a socio-cultural perspective. Arthur Frank, Department of Sociology, University of Calgary Medicine as Culture is unlike any other sociological text on health and medicine. It combines perspectives drawn from a wide variety of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, social history, cultural geography, and media and cultural studies. The book explores the ways in which medicine and health care are sociocultural constructions, ranging from popular media and elite cultural representations of illness to the power dynamics of the doctor-patient relationship. The Third Edition has been updated to cover new areas of interest, including: - studies of space and place in relation to the body - actor-network theory as it is applied in research related to medicine - The internet and social media and how they contribute to lay health knowledge and patient support - complementary and alternative medicine - obesity and fat politics. Contextualising introductions and discussion points in every chapter makes Medicine as Culture, Third Edition a rigorous yet accessible text for students. Deborah Lupton is an independent sociologist and Honorary Associate in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney.
Updated second edition: “A bold and imaginative book which moves our thinking about narratives of illness in new directions.” —Sociology of Heath and Illness Since it was first published in 1995, The Wounded Storyteller has occupied a unique place in the body of work on illness. A collective portrait of a so-called “remission society” of those who suffer from illness or disability, as well as a cogent analysis of their stories within a larger framework of narrative theory, Arthur W. Frank’s book has reached a large and diverse readership including the ill, medical professionals, and scholars of literary theory. Drawing on the work of such authors as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known—Gilda Radner’s battle with ovarian cancer—to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilities. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: They abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. In this new edition Frank adds a preface describing the personal and cultural times when the first edition was written. His new afterword extends the book’s argument significantly, discussing storytelling and experience, other modes of illness narration, and a version of hope that is both realistic and aspirational. Reflecting on his own life during the creation of the first edition and the conclusions of the book itself, he reminds us of the power of storytelling as way to understand our own suffering. “Arthur W. Frank’s second edition of The Wounded Storyteller provides instructions for use of this now-classic text in the study of illness narratives.” —Rita Charon, author of Narrative Medicine “Frank sees the value of illness narratives not so much in solving clinical conundrums as in addressing the question of how to live a good life.” —Christianity Today
Medicine and health care are currently faced with a significant rise in their complexity. This is partly due to the progress made during the past three decades in the fundamental biological understanding of the causes of health and disease at the molecular, (sub)cellular, and organ level. Since the end of the 1970s, when knowledge representation and reasoning in the biomedical field became a separate area of research, huge progress has been made in the development of methods and tools that are finally able to impact on the way medicine is being practiced. Even though there are huge differences in the techniques and methods used by biomedical researchers, there is now an increasing tendency to share research results in terms of formal knowledge representation methods, such as ontologies, statistical models, network models, and mathematical models. As there is an urgent need for health-care professionals to make better decisions, computer-based support using this knowledge is now becoming increasingly important. It may also be the only way to integrate research results from the different parts of the spectrum of biomedical and clinical research. The aim of this book is to shed light on developments in knowledge representation at different levels of biomedical application, ranging from human biology to clinical guidelines, and using different techniques, from probability theory and differential equations to logic. The book starts with two introductory chapters followed by 18 contributions organized in the following topical sections: diagnosis of disease; monitoring of health and disease and conformance; assessment of health and personalization; prediction and prognosis of health and disease; treatment of disease; and recommendations.
A lively interdisciplinary study of how venereal disease was represented in eighteenth-century British literature and artIn eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often represented using slang, symbolism, and wordplay. In this book, literary critic Noelle Gallagher explores the cultural significance of the “clap” (gonorrhea), the “pox” (syphilis), and the “itch” (genital scabies) for the development of eighteenth-century British literature and art.As a condition both represented through metaphors and used as a metaphor, venereal disease provided a vehicle for the discussion of cultural anxieties about gender, race, commerce, and immigration. Gallagher highlights four key concepts associated with the disease, demonstrating how the infection’s symbolic potency was enhanced by its links to elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and nasal deformity. Casting light where the sun rarely shines, this study will fascinate anyone interested in the history of literature, art, medicine, and sexuality.
A striking account of a colony for the mentally ill that forces a reconsideration of madness in society. What happens when the mentally ill are not isolated from society but are instead welcomed into it and invited to take a place in the fabric of the community? Are fear and rejection replaced by the understanding and sympathy often engendered by familiarity? Or are the barriers between the sane and the mad only strengthened? We have experienced a taste of this scenario in the U.S. in the last decade with the new emphasis on de-institutionalization, but Denise Jodelet takes us to an extraordinary community in France where the mentally ill have assumed a visible and prominent role for more than seventy years. The small French town of Ainay-le-Ch�teau and its environs are the site of a "family colony" for men, established in 1900. Here the patients ("lodgers") live with ordinary families ("foster parents"), hold jobs, and are free to move about the countryside. Jodelet's chronicle of daily life in the colony is made rich and vivid by extensive ethnographic material as she unravels a complex set of relationships, ultimately finding that while some of the barriers between the "other" and the larger society have been overcome, new ones have arisen in their place. This unique social experiment provides invaluable social and cultural insights, illuminating many fundamental issues in psychology, psychiatry, and sociology.
"In this penetrating analysis of the social attitudes toward various major illnesses - chiefly tuberculosis, the scourge of the 19th century, and cancer, the terror of our own - Susan Sontag demonstrates that "illness is not a metaphor" and shows why "the healthiest way of being ill is one purified of metaphoric thinking." Once tuberculosis was identified as a bacterial infection, it ceased to be a symbol of a romantic fading away or of a sensitive or artistic temperament, and it could be treated and cured. Similarly, we must today cease to think of cancer as a mark of doom, a punishment or a sign of a repressed personality, and recognize it for what it is: one disease among many and often receptive to treatment." -- from back cover.