The Meaning of Illness by S Kay Toombs
A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH My interest in exploring the nature of the patient's and the physician's understanding of illness has grown out of my own experience as a multiple sclerosis patient. In discussing my illness with physicians, it has often seemed to me that we have been somehow talking at cross purposes, discussing different things, never quite reaching one another. This inability to communicate does not, for the most part, result from inatten tiveness or insensitivity but from a fundamental disagreement about the nature of illness. Rather than representing a shared reality between us, illness represents two quite distinct realities - the meaning of one being significantly and distinctively different from the meaning of the other. In this work I shall suggest that psychological phenomenology provides the means to examine the nature of this fundamental disagreement between physician and patient in a rigorous fashion.! In particular, psychological phenomenology discloses the manner in which the of his or her experience. individual constitutes the meaning In providing a phenomenological description,2 the phenomenologist is committed to the effort to begin with what is given in immediate ex perience, to tum to the essential features of what presents itself as it presents itself to consciousness, and thereby to clarify the constitutive activity of consciousness and the sense-structure of experiencing.S. KAY TOOMBS is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University and author of The Meaning of Illness. DAVID BARNARD is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Humanities at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine. He is the co-editor (with William R. Rogers) of Nourishing the Humanistic in Medicine: Interactions with the Social Sciences. RONALD A. CARSON is Harris L. Kempner Professor of Medical Humanities and Director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities, The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. He is co-editor of Medical Humanities Review.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780792324430 |
| ISBN 10 | 0792324439 |
| Title | The Meaning of Illness |
| Author | S Kay Toombs |
| Series | Philosophy And Medicine |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Springer |
| Year published | 1993-08-31 |
| Number of pages | 165 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |