The Language of Illness

The Language of Illness
Author: Fergus Shanahan
Publisher: Liberties Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1912589168

The practice of medicine has advanced dramatically in recent years, but the language used to discuss illness – by medical practitioners, patients and carers – has not kept pace. As a result, clinicians and, just as importantly, patients and their relatives and carers, are not able to communicate clearly in relation to illness. The upshot is misunderstanding and confusion on all sides. In this ground-breaking book, Dr Fergus Shanahan, an eminent gastroenterologist who has practised in Ireland, the United States and Canada, and published widely around the world, looks at memoirs of illness, and outlines the lessons we can learn from a better understanding of the words we use to describe illness. He looks at the ways in which language can act as a barrier with regard to illness, and proposes practical ways in which we can dismantle these barriers. The book is written for the general reader: as Dr Shanahan puts it himself, he is "enough of an expert to be wary of experts". The Language of Illness, part manifesto, part memoir, and part instruction manual, is an appeal for the use of clearer, more holistic language, by all those involved with, and affected by, illness. Like the great American poet-doctor William Carlos Williams, he aims to help us develop a new language by means of which we can develop a new way of living with illness – which is an integral part of the human condition. Put simply, it is a book for all those who care about caring.

Illness

Illness
Author: Havi Carel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2016-09-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 131548739X

What is illness? Is it a physiological dysfunction, a social label, or a way of experiencing the world? How do the physical, social and emotional worlds of a person change when they become ill? And can there be well-being within illness? In this remarkable and thought-provoking book, Havi Carel explores these questions by weaving together the personal story of her own serious illness with insights and reflections drawn from her work as a philosopher. Carel's fresh approach to illness raises some uncomfortable questions about how we all - whether healthcare professionals or not - view the ill and challenges us to become more thoughtful. 'Illness' unravels the tension between the universality of illness and its intensely private, often lonely, nature. It offers a new way of looking at a matter that affects every one of us.

Gender and the Language of Illness

Gender and the Language of Illness
Author: J. Charteris-Black
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2010-07-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0230281664

An investigation of the influence of gender, social class, age and illness type in the language of people talking about their experiences of illness. It shows evidence of both conformity with and resistance to gender stereotypes.

Making Sense of Illness

Making Sense of Illness
Author: Robert A. Aronowitz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1998
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780521558259

This 1998 book contains historical essays about how diseases change their meaning.

Treatments

Treatments
Author: Lisa Diedrich
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 251
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 1452913048

Creative expression inspired by disease has been criticized as a celebration of victimhood, unmediated personal experience, or just simply bad art. Despite debate, however, memoirs written about illness—particularly AIDS or cancer—have proliferated since the late twentieth century and occupy a highly influential place on the cultural landscape today. In Treatments, Lisa Diedrich considers illness narratives, demonstrating that these texts not only recount and interpret symptoms but also describe illness as an event that reflects wider cultural contexts, including race, gender, class, and sexuality. Diedrich begins this theoretically rigorous analysis by offering examples of midcentury memoirs of tuberculosis. She then looks at Susan Sontag’s Illness As Metaphor, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “White Glasses,” showing how these breast cancer survivors draw on feminist health practices of the 1970s and also anticipate the figure that would appear in the wake of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s—the “politicized patient.” She further reveals how narratives written by doctors Abraham Verghese and Rafael Campo about treating people with AIDS can disrupt the doctor–patient hierarchy, and she explores practices of witnessing that emerge in writing by Paul Monette and John Bayley. Through these records of intensely personal yet universal experience, Diedrich demonstrates how language both captures and fails to capture these “scenes of loss” and how illness narratives affect the literary, medical, and cultural contexts from which they arise. Finally, by examining the ways in which the sick speak and are spoken for, she argues for an ethics of failure—the revaluation of loss as creating new possibilities for how we live and die. Lisa Diedrich is assistant professor of women’s studies at Stony Brook University.

The Body Language of Illness

The Body Language of Illness
Author: Eleanor Limmer
Publisher: Freedom Press (WA)
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2000-07-01
Genre: Holistic medicine
ISBN: 9780967818313

The Body language of Illness offers a clear, effective method of inquiry by which the mental, emotional, and spiritual messages of illness can be discovered, understood, and answered. This method of inquiry allows us to access and understand these messages ourselves, rather than having to depend upon prescribed lists of general meanings. Through this discovery, the meanings of illness can have a personal significance that can help heal us. Illnesses symbolize specific conflicts that can be recognized, understood, and healed.

The End of Illness

The End of Illness
Author: David B. Agus
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2012-01-17
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1451610173

From one of the world's foremost physicians and researchers comes a monumental work that radically redefines conventional conceptions of health and illness to offer new methods for living a long, healthy life.

Anatomy of an Illness As Perceived By the Patient

Anatomy of an Illness As Perceived By the Patient
Author: Norman Cousins
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2005-07-12
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 9780393326840

The story of a recovery from a crippling disease and the physician patient partnership that beat the odds by using the patient's own capabilities.

Meaning-Full Disease

Meaning-Full Disease
Author: Brian Broom
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2018-03-28
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429916140

The book is grounded upon the author's extensive professional involvement with physical diseases that are a powerful expression of the patients' emotional themes and life-stories. They are meaning-full diseases. They occur commonly, and are the most compelling argument for an urgent acknowledgment of the role of meanings in the healing process. Following the pattern of his first book, Somatic Illness and the Patient's Other Story, the author shows in case after case that listening and responding to the "story" of patients suffering from persistent physical diseases frequently leads to major reversal of the disease processes. This present book takes a crucial second step. There must be an understandable basis for meaning-full diseases. Resistance to them relates in part to the inability of current Western scientific and biomedical theories to explain them. The author sets out to construct conceptual frameworks, within which clinicians and patients can see that a close relationship between life experience and the appearance of physical disease really does make sense.

Illness and Healing

Illness and Healing
Author: Judith von Halle
Publisher: Temple Lodge Publishing
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2008
Genre: Bibles
ISBN: 1902636988

"The contents of this volume have arisen from my own spiritual experience, and do not represent any kind of hypothesis or speculation, except where I expressly say that I am unable to make any definitive statement about a particular event or set of circumstances." --Judith von Halle After she received the stigmata, Judith von Halle began vividly to perceive the events that occurred at the time of Christ. These continuing experiences are not visions, but rather actual participation, involving all human senses, in the events themselves. To complement this personal witnessing of Christ's life, von Halle has researched the facts using spiritual-scientific methods, based on the human "I" crossing of the spiritual threshold while fully conscious. Here she explores here, in her continuing series 'Approaches to Understanding the Christ Event', the nature of illnesses at the time of Christ, as described in the Gospels, and how he approached the process of healing them. The Gospels conceal untapped treasures that can be brought to light only by deciphering their inherently pictorial language. By developing a spiritual-scientific mode of thinking, we can create the foundation for examining the causes and cures of illness. The author explains the meaning of certain phrases and passages in the Gospels, translating them from their metaphorical form into modern language. She also reveals why illnesses at the time of Christ were different from medical disorders of today and looks into the nature and causes of modern illnesses.