Making Sense Of: Health, Illness and Disease: (11 At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries)

Health, illness and disease are topics well-suited to interdisciplinary inquiry. This book brings together scholars from around the world who share an interest in and a commitment to bridging the traditional boundaries of inquiry. We hope that this book begins new conversations that will situate health in broader socio-cultural contexts and establish connections between health, illness and disease and other socio-political issues. This book is the outcome of the first global conference on “Making Sense of: Health, Illness and Disease,” held at St Catherine's College, Oxford, in June 2002. The selected papers pursue a range of topics from the cultural significance of narratives of health, illness and disease to healing practices in contemporary society as well as patients’ illness experiences. Researchers and health care practitioners now live in the age of interdisciplinarity, which has transformed both health care delivery and research on health. The essays in this collection transcend the traditional boundaries of biomedicine and draw attention to the many ways in which health is embedded in socio-cultural norms and how these norms, in turn, shape health practices and health care. This volume is of interest not only to researchers but also to those delivering health care.

Table of Contents:
Vera KALITZKUS and Peter L. TWOHIG: Introduction Part 1 Theoretical and Historical Approaches Harold SCHWEIZER: The Question of Meaning in Suffering Gloria Nne ONYEOZIRI: The Scholarship of Blindness and the Blindness of Scholarship Jayanta BHATTACHARYA: The Body: Epistemological Encounters in Colonial India Betty BEDNARSKI: Putting Medicine in its Place: The Case of Physician-Writer Jacques Ferron Louise PENNER: Florence Nightingale’s Sensational Narratives of Contagion and Contamination Part 2 Narratives and Metaphors Catherine GARRETT: Meaning and Spirituality in Stories of Chronic Illness Emma GOVAN: Entertaining Illness Sofie VANDAMME and Arko ODERWALD: Myths and Metaphors of Illness Reconsidered: Nancy versus Sontag Part 3 Healing Practices Today Peter L. TWOHIG, Wayne PUTNAM, Lois JACKSON, Fred BURGE and Jafina COX: “Shades of Grey”: A Qualitative Inquiry of Evidence and Contemporary Family Practice Jarmila MILDORF: Narratives of Domestic Violence Cases: GPs Defining Their Professional Role Bernie WARREN: Treating Wellness: How Clown Doctors Help to Humanize Health Care and Promote Good Health Celia E. BANDMAN, Bernard M. BANDMAN, Patricia A. BARR, and Letha E. MILLS: The Medical Humanist: A Pilot Program in the Cancer Center Setting Part 4 Making Sense of Living with Illness Susan L. MILLS: Living Well with Chronic Illness Jane APPLETON: Ethical Issues in Narrative Research in Palliative Care Emma-Jane SAYERS and Miles LITTLE: Post-Cancer Distress in Some Cancer Survivors: Well-being, Self-determination Theory and a Downward Cycle Vera KALITZKUS: Life “In Limbo”: Donor Families, Organ Recipients and their Experience in Germany