Main description:

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.

Contents:

Vera KALITZKUS and Peter L. TWOHIG: Introduction
Part 1. Perspectives from Literature
Harold SCHWEIZER: On Waiting and Hoping in Raymond Carver's "A Small, Good Thing"
Jennifer COOKE: Writing Plague: Transforming Narrative, Witnessing and History
Sherah WELLS: Strand by Strand: Untying the Knots of Mental and Physical Illness in the Correspondence and Diaries of Antonia White and Emily Holmes Coleman
Part 2. Politics, Community and Biomedicine
Stephan VAN ERP: Diagnosing Hidden Religion in Medicine: Health, Illness and the Politics of Hope
Kate COLEMAN: Personal and Communal Reactions to Cancer: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis of the Beliefs held by Charedi Jewish Breast Cancer Patients
Janina KEHR: The Politics and Poetics of Migrant Tuberculosis: Modelling a "Social Disease" in French Public Health
Monica BROWN: Woman as Mysterious Machine: Metaphor, Rhetoric and Female Sexual Dysfunction
Part 3. The Multiple Subjectivities of Addiction
Andy RUDDOCK: It's the Stories You Tell: Binge Drinking, Violence and Celebrity
Maria CAIATA ZUFFEREY: "I use drugs, but I am not a drug addict": How Heroin and Cocaine Users Make Sense of Their Practice as a Healthy Behaviour
Kimmo SAARISTO: Abnormal Normality: Addiction, Identity and the Problem of Normal