|
Showing 1 - 14 of
14 matches in All Departments
Susan Sontag once described illness as "the night-side of life."
When we or our loved ones fall ill, our world is thrown into
darkness and disarray, our routines are interrupted, our deepest
beliefs shaken. The modern regime of hyper-logical biomedicine
offers little solace when it comes to the effects of ill health on
our inner lives. By exploring the role of desire in illness, Eros
and Illness offers an alternative: an unconventional, deeply human
exploration of what it means to live with, and live through,
disease. When we face down illness, something beyond biomedicine's
extremely valuable advances in treatment and prevention is sorely
needed. Desire in its many guises plays a crucial part in illness,
David Morris shows. Emotions, dreams, and stories-even romance and
eroticism-shape our experiences as patients and as caregivers. Our
perception of the world we enter through illness-including too
often a world of pain-is shaped by desire. Writing from his own
heartbreaking experience as a caretaker for his wife, Morris
relates how desire can worsen or, with care, mitigate the heavy
weight of disease. He looks to myths, memoirs, paintings,
performances, and narratives to understand how illness is
intertwined with the things we value most dearly. Drawing on
cultural resources from many centuries and media, Eros and Illness
reaches out a hand to guide us through the long night of illness,
showing us how to find productive desire where we expected only
despair and defeat.
These volumes were originally published in 2004. The close
association between the United States and the Federal Republic of
Germany was a key element in the international order of the Cold
War era. No country had as wide-reaching or as profound an impact
on the western portion of divided Germany as the United States. No
country better exemplified the East-West conflict in American
thinking than Germany. The United States and Germany in the Era of
the Cold War examines all facets of German-American relations and
interaction in the decades from the defeat of the Third Reich to
Germany's reunification in 1990. In addition to its comprehensive
treatment of US-West German political, economic, social, and
cultural ties, The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold
War provides an overview of the more limited dealings between the
US and the communist German Democratic Republic.
These volumes were originally published in 2004. The close
association between the United States and the Federal Republic of
Germany was a key element in the international order of the Cold
War era. No country had as wide-reaching or as profound an impact
on the western portion of divided Germany as the United States. No
country better exemplified the East-West conflict in American
thinking than Germany. The United States and Germany in the Era of
the Cold War examines all facets of German-American relations and
interaction in the decades from the defeat of the Third Reich to
Germany's reunification in 1990. In addition to its comprehensive
treatment of US-West German political, economic, social, and
cultural ties, The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold
War provides an overview of the more limited dealings between the
US and the communist German Democratic Republic.
These volumes were originally published in 2004. The close
association between the United States and the Federal Republic of
Germany was a key element in the international order of the Cold
War era. No country had as wide-reaching or as profound an impact
on the western portion of divided Germany as the United States. No
country better exemplified the East-West conflict in American
thinking than Germany. The United States and Germany in the Era of
the Cold War examines all facets of German-American relations and
interaction in the decades from the defeat of the Third Reich to
Germany's reunification in 1990. In addition to its comprehensive
treatment of US-West German political, economic, social, and
cultural ties, The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold
War provides an overview of the more limited dealings between the
US and the communist German Democratic Republic.
These volumes were originally published in 2004. The close
association between the United States and the Federal Republic of
Germany was a key element in the international order of the Cold
War era. No country had as wide-reaching or as profound an impact
on the western portion of divided Germany as the United States. No
country better exemplified the East-West conflict in American
thinking than Germany. The United States and Germany in the Era of
the Cold War examines all facets of German-American relations and
interaction in the decades from the defeat of the Third Reich to
Germany's reunification in 1990. In addition to its comprehensive
treatment of US-West German political, economic, social, and
cultural ties, The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold
War provides an overview of the more limited dealings between the
US and the communist German Democratic Republic.
"With Lous Heshusius as a guide, pain patients can learn much
about the perils of a modern health-care odyssey. Health
professionals can learn how an articulate middle-class female white
patient thinks (with all that thinking entails) when her world is
irreversibly altered by pain. She does not promise happy endings.
Chronic pain is like that. From the rare intersection in this text
between patient narrative and physician response, however, readers
may construct a dialogue on pain in our time that cannot fail to
bring plentiful opportunities for personal insight and professional
enlightenment." from the Foreword by David B. Morris
Chronic pain, which affects 70 million people in the United
States alone more than diabetes, cancer, and heart disease combined
is a major public health issue that remains poorly understood both
within the health care system and by those closest to the people it
afflicts. This book examines the experience of pain in ways that
could significantly improve how patients and practitioners deal
with pain. It is the first volume of a new collection of titles
within the acclaimed Culture and Politics of Health Care Work
series called How Patients Think, intended to give voice to the
concerns of patients about their own medical care and the
formulation of health policy.
Since surviving a near-fatal car accident, Lous Heshusius has
suffered from chronic pain for more than a decade, forcing her to
give up her career as a professor of education. Inside Chronic
Pain, based in part on the pain journal Heshusius keeps, is a
stunning memoir of a life lived in constant pain as well as an
insightful and often critical account of the inadequacies of the
health care system from physicians to hospitals and health
insurance companies to understand chronic pain and treat those who
suffer from it. Through her own frequently frustrating experiences,
she shows how health care providers often ignore, deny, or
incorrectly treat chronic pain at immense cost to both the patient
and the health care system. She also offers cogent suggestions on
improving the quality and outcome of chronic pain care and
management, using her encounters with exceptional medical
professionals as models.
Inside Chronic Pain deals with pain's dramatic and destructive
effects on one's sense of self and identity. It chronicles the
chaos that takes place, the paralyzing effect of severe pain, the
changes in personality that ensue, and the corrosive effects of
severe pain on the ability to attend to day-to-day tasks. It
describes how one's social life falls apart and isolation takes
over. It also relates moments of happiness and beauty and describes
how rooting the self in the present is crucial in managing
pain.
A unique feature of Inside Chronic Pain is the clinical
commentary by Dr. Scott M. Fishman, president of the American Pain
Foundation. Fishman has long tried to improve the lives of patients
like Heshusius. His medical perspective on her very human narrative
will help physicians and other clinicians better understand and
treat patients with chronic pain."
We become ill in ways our parents and grandparents did not, with
diseases unheard of and treatments undreamed of by them. Illness
has changed in the postmodern era - roughly the period since World
War II - as dramatically as technology, transportation, and the
texture of everyday life. Exploring these changes, David B. Morris
tells the fascinating story, or stories, of what goes into making
the postmodern experience of illness different, perhaps unique.
Even as he decries the overuse and misuse of the term 'postmodern',
Morris shows how brightly ideas of illness, health, and
postmodernism illuminate one another in late-twentieth-century
culture. Modern medicine traditionally separates disease - an
objectively verified disorder - from illness - a patient's
subjective experience. Postmodern medicine, Morris says, can make
no such clean distinction; instead, it demands a biocultural model,
situating illness at the crossroads of biology and culture.
Maladies such as chronic fatigue syndrome and post-traumatic stress
disorder signal our awareness that there are biocultural ways of
being sick. The biocultural vision of illness not only blurs old
boundaries but also offers a new and infinitely promising arena for
investigating both biology and culture. In many ways "Illness and
Culture in the Postmodern Age" leads us to understand our
experience of the world differently.
This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest
surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten
years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying
question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The
overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern
culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us
with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains.
We live in an era when many people believe--as a basic, unexamined
foundation of thought--that pain comes divided into separate types:
physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are
as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm
breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between
these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and
deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to
navigate.
This perceptive, carefully documented study challenges the
traditional assumption that the supernatural virtually disappeared
from eighteenth-century poetry as a result of the growing
rationalistic temper of the late seventeenth century. Mr. Morris
shows that the religious poetry of eighteenth-century England,
while not equaling the brilliant work of seventeenth-century and
Romantic writers, does reveal a vital and serious effort to create
a new kind of sacred poetry which would rival the sublimity of
Milton and of the Bible itself. Tracing the major varieties of
religious poetry written throughout the century -- by major figures
and by their now vanished contemporaries -- the author explains how
later poets and critics made significant departures from the
established norms. These changes in religious poetry thus become a
valuable means of understanding the shift from a neoclassical to a
Romantic theory of literature.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Back Together
Michael Ball & Alfie Boe
CD
(1)
R59
Discovery Miles 590
|