Stories of Sickness by Howard Brody

Stories of Sickness by Howard Brody

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

Howard Brody is professor and director for the Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Brody was University Distinguished Professor of family practice, and philosophy at Michigan State University, where he also sat on the faculty of the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences; he served as director of the Center from 1985-2000. Dr. Brody completed his residency in family practice at the University of Virginia Medical Center. He received his MD from the College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University, in 1976, and his PhD in Philosophy, also from Michigan State University, in 1977. He currently sits on the board of the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities, and specializes in ethics and the doctor-patient relationship. He has authored five books, among them Stories of Sickness (2002) and The Placebo Response: How You Can Release the Body's Inner Pharmacy for Better Health (2000). For up-to-date news about the issues covered in Hooked, visit Dr. Brody's new blog.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780300039771
ISBN 10	0300039778
Title	Stories of Sickness
Author	Howard Brody
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Yale University Press
Year published	1988-09-10
Number of pages	228
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable