The first edition helped bring the family approach to health care into the medical mainstream. This new edition, like the first, provides health care professionals with a practical guide to working with and treating both the individual patient and the family. Tackling challenging and emerging issues, such as AIDS and the family, race and gender, child abuse and domestic violence in addition to pregnancy, child behavior and chronic illness, this volume is sure to be an indispensable guide for primary care providers.

In the narrative of every human life and family, illness is a prominent character. Even if we have avoided serious illness ourselves, we cannot escape its reach into our circle of family and friends. Illness brings us closer to one another through caregiving and separates us through disability and death, yet little attention has been paid to personal and family illness in psychotherapy. Rather, therapists tend to focus on the psychosocial realm, leaving the biological realm to other physicians and nurses. Susan H. McDaniel, Jeri Hepworth, and William J. Doherty invited therapists who work with individuals and families experiencing chronic illness and disability to describe clinical cases that illustrate their approach to medical family therapy. Contributors then were asked to share a personal story about their experiences with illness, and to explain how those experiences affect the way they work with their clients. Vivid case studies dealing with a range of illnesses, including cancer infertility, schizophrenia, AIDS, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and multiple sclerosis, show how the therapists' own experiences of illness are relevant to their care of others-and how these experiences can be used to form a healing bond in therapy. Poignant, honest, and illuminating, "The Shared Experience of Illness" allows us to understand more fully the relationship between the personal and the professional.