Serious illness and mortality, those most universal, unavoidable, and frightening of human experiences, are the focus of this pioneering study, which has been hailed as a telling and provocative commentary on our times. As modern medicine has become more scientific and dispassionate, a new literary genre as emerged: pathography, the personal narrative concerning illness, treatment and sometimes death. Hawkins's sensitive reading of numerous pathographies highlights the assumptions, attitudes, and myths that people bring to the medical encounter. One factor emerges again and again in these "case studies": the tendency in contemporary medical practice to focus primarily not on the needs of the individual who is sick but on the condition that we call disease. Recommended for medical practitioners, the clergy, caregivers, students of popular culture, and the general reader, Reconstructing Illness demonstrates that "only when we hear both the doctor's and the patient's voice will we have a medicine that is truly human."

This unusual book presents three prize-winning one-act plays on the hard choices that patients, their families, and their physicians often face at the end of life. The purpose of the volume is to increase awareness and knowledge about advance directives and, beyond that, to facilitate discussion about the many complicated issues surrounding death and dying today.Each play is followed by critical commentary. The introduction provides lucid and succinct explanation of the human, ethical, and legal contexts for the rights of patients in the United States. The volume includes appendices providing values history and living will declarations, durable power of attorney statements, and resource information.

About the Contributor(s): Anne Hunsaker Hawkins is Professor Emerita, Penn State College of Medicine, where she served as Professor of Humanities and Director of the Drs. Kienle Center for Humanistic Medicine. She is the author of several books, including Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography and A Small, Good Thing: Stories about Children with HIV and Those Who Care for Them. Her numerous published articles concern a wide range of topics, including studies of the relevance of humanistic medicine to Dante's Divine Comedy, Homer's Iliad, Sophocles' Philoctetes, Donne's Devotions, and Chretien de Troyes' Yvain. Hawkins lives in Philadelphia.

The essays in Augustine and Psychology, edited by Sandra Lee Dixon, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth, relate St. Augustine to the modern theory and practice of psychology in several ways. The contributors analyze Augustine's own examination of himself (and occasionally others) to see to what extent he himself was a "doctor" or practiced "therapy" in ways that we can recognize and appreciate; they find connections between his theories of memory and mind, and modern theories of the same; they consider the influences and context in which he worked, and how those affected him and his ideas of the mind and soul; and, lastly, the contributors subject St. Augustine to the scrutiny of modern psychoanalysis (and critique such scrutiny where appropriate).

It was only when Dolores was on her deathbed that she told her husband, Cesar, that she had AIDS, as did their two small children and Cesar. Despite overwhelming obstacles, Cesar is fiercely devoted to caring for his children, one of whom is blind from the disease. Loretta and Mike Riley are on welfare with physical ailments of their own (diabetes, cancer, heart disease); nonetheless their love for a boy severely disabled from AIDS has brought about an astonishing transformation in him. Angelina, because of emotional problems in addition to HIV complications, has been in six different foster homes in two years, but is now in a home where she is thriving. Far from despairing, A Small, Good Thing presents intimate and life-affirming portraits of children born with HIV and the medical personnel, biological families, and foster families who care for them. Through these stories we see the effects of the disease on children and the efficacy of current treatments as well as the ins and outs of the medical systems and social agencies meant to help these children. Children with HIV are an often overlooked group. This immensely powerful and important book provides much needed attention and hope.