Illness and Self in Society

Cover
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987 - 271 Seiten
Is the way in which we perceive illness a development of the nineteenth century, when the calamitous epidemics of earlier times gave way to the new scourge of tuberculosis? The authors take an extraordinarily wide-ranging and provocative look at illness as a social phenomenon from the Middle Ages to the present- and uncover the multiple ideas and realities behind what we have come to call "a sick person." Drawing upon the history of medicine and mentalities, on literary representations as well as on hundreds of conversation with people suffering from or living with disease, the authors have explored the very different ways in which every society structures illness and the status of the ill in accord with its own values. And they have explicated the changing ways in which the sick have perceived the presence of illness in their own bodies, have absorbed the medical knowledge of their time, and have sought to give meaning to their sufferings. -- From Book Jacket.

Inhalt

From Consumption to Tuberculosis
24
Registers of Memory and Forgetting Memories of yesterdays ills? 38
38
The Illnesses of Modern Life
49
From Causes to Meaning
98
Contagion
104
The wear and tear of work
112
The hidden meaning
118
IDENTITIES OF THE SICK
127
Sinners and Penitents
139
Medicine and the Sick
190
From Selfhelp to the Duty to Be Healthy
210
Conclusion
237
Index
250
190
256
237
263
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