E-Book Overview
Human suffering and illness as well as health and healing are topics of ongoing actuality. In a world of growing complexity and interrelatedness a broader perspective on these topics is needed. The global conference project on "Making Sense of: Health, Illness and Disease" is a forum for scholars from various countries who are interested in deepening the interdisciplinary discourse on the subject. This book is the outcome of the 5th conference held at Mansfield College, Oxford, in July 2006. It combines essays that transgress traditional disciplinary boundaries in the field of health care delivery and medicine. It thus will be of interest to students in the medical humanities, researchers as well as health care providers who wish to gain insight into the various perspectives through which health, illness and disease can be understood.
E-Book Content
The Tapestry of Health, Illness and Disease At the Interface Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Nancy Billias Advisory Board Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Professor Margaret Chatterjee Dr Wayne Cristaudo Dr Mira Crouch Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Dr Jones Irwin Professor Asa Kasher Owen Kelly Dr Martin McGoldrick Revd Stephen Morris Professor John Parry Professor Peter L. Twohig Professor S Ram Vemuri Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E Volume 55 A volume in the Probing the Boundaries series ‘Making Sense Of: Health, Illness and Disease’ Probing the Boundaries The Tapestry of Health, Illness and Disease Edited by Vera Kalitzkus and Peter L. Twohig Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2515-8 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands Contents Introduction Vera Kalitzkus and Peter L. Twohig Part 1 Perspectives from Literature On Waiting and Hoping in Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing” Harold Schweizer Writing Plague: Transforming Narrative, Witnessing and History Jennifer Cooke Strand by Strand: Untying the Knots of Mental and Physical Illness in the Correspondence and Diaries of Antonia White And Emily Holmes Coleman Sherah Wells Part 2 Politics, Community and Biomedicine Diagnosing Hidden Religion in Medicine: Health, Illness and the Politics of Hope Stephan van Erp Personal and Communal Reactions to Cancer: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis of the Beliefs held by Charedi Jewish Breast Cancer Patients Kate Coleman The Politics and Poetics of Migrant Tuberculosis: Modelling a “Social Disease” in French Public Health Janina Kehr Woman as Mysterious Machine: Metaphor, Rhetoric and Female Sexual Dysfunction Monica Brown 1 7 21 43 59 75 99 125 vi Part 3 Contents The Multiple Subjectivities of Addiction It’s the Stories You Tell: Binge Drinking, Violence and Celebrity Andy Ruddock 137 “I use drugs, but I am not a drug addict”: How Heroin and Cocaine Users Make Sense of Their Practice as a Healthy Behaviour 163 Maria Caiata Zufferey Abnormal Normality: Addiction, Identity and the Problem of Normal Kimmo Saaristo 177 Welcome to a Probing the Boundaries Project The Tapestry of Health, Illness and Disease appears within the Making Sense of: Health, Illness and Disease project series of publications. These projects conduct inter- and multi-disciplinary research aiming to explore the processes by which we attempt to create meaning in health, illness and disease. The projects examine the models we use to understand our experiences of health and illness (looking particularly at perceptions of the body), and evaluate the diversity