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 has 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. Pathography allows the individual person a voice—one that asserts the importance of the experiential side of illness, and thus restores the feeling, thinking, experiencing human being to the center of the medical enterprise. 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.
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE: Introduction
CHAPTER Two: The Myth of Rebirth and the Promise of Cure
CHAPTER THREE: Myths of Battle and Journey
CHAPTER FOUR: Constructing Death: Myths about Dying
CHAPTER FIVE: Healthy-Mindedness: Myth as Medicine
CHAPTER SIX: Pathographies and Ideological Myth in the 1990s
APPENDIX
NOTES
REFERENCES
INDEX
