Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography, Second Edition

by Anne Hunsaker Hawkins

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781557531261
Publisher:	Purdue University Press
Publication date:	08/01/1998
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	289
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Anne Hunsaker Hawkins is an associate professor of humanities at the Pennsylvania State University School of Medicine. She is the author of a book on autobiographies of conversation and numerous articles on the humanities and medicine.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

"Doctors may describe diseases and their effects from the outside; only patients can describe them from the inside. Such descriptions, which Anne Hunsaker Hawkins calls ‘pathographies,’ take the form of vivid personal accounts, often of journeys into a fearful realm of sickness. Reconstructing Illness is a beautifully written and profound consideration of the range of such pathographies, their organizing myths and metaphors, and the light they cast on what it means to be human in the face of illness." —Oliver Sacks

"Anne Hunsaker Hawkins’s Reconstructing Illness is an intelligent and insightful consideration of what she characterizes as a new literary genre." —Times Literary Supplement

"The book has earned an important place in courses on medical practices as well as courses treating any of the various relationships between story and healing and is accessible and engaging enough to be useful to all who struggle with serious illness." Medical Humanities Review

"Hawkins . . . argues convincingly that today’s 'pathographies’ are replacing the stories of religious conversion that were popular in earlier eras . . . The observations about contemporary culture and our feelings about death and illness are plausible and intriguing, and the writing is clear." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

The book has earned an important place in courses on medical practices as well as courses treating any of the various relationships between story and healing and is accessible and engaging enough to be useful to all who struggle with serious illness.”

Medical Humanities Review

Medical Humanities Review

Anne Hunsaker Hawkins’s Reconstructing
Illness is an intelligent and insightful consideration of what she characterizes as a new literary genre.”

Times Literary Supplement

Times Literary Supplement

Doctors may describe diseases and their effects from the outside; only patients can describe them from the inside. Such descriptions,
which Anne Hunsaker Hawkins calls ‘pathographies,’ take the form of vivid personal accounts, often of journeys into a fearful realm of sickness. Reconstructing Illness is a beautifully written and profound consideration of the range of such pathographies, their organizing myths and metaphors, and the light they cast on what it means to be human in the face of illness.”

Oliver Sacks

Hawkins, an associate professor of humanities at Pennsylvania State University School of Medicine, argues convincingly that today's ``pathographies,'' or first-person written accounts of experiences with disease, are replacing the stories of religious conversion that were popular in earlier eras. She posits that each of these works chooses one of three central themes to make sense out of impending death. One theme views death and illness as a battle or journey to be undertaken; a second is framed as a quest for ``the good death''; the third posits the belief that patients can take responsibility for their own recovery. Sources such as Paul Monette's Borrowed Time and Gilda Radner's comic autobiography back up these theories, but sometimes Hawkins flits from one work to the next without lending the reader any complex understanding of them. Furthermore, the organization of the three types of pathography into separate chapters does not allow for the possibility that some books fall into more than one category. However, the observations about contemporary culture and our feelings about death and illness are plausible and intriguing, and the writing is clear. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Studies the myths, attitudes, and assumptions that inform the way we deal with illness. Begins with an analysis of a popular literary genre, recent biographies and autobiographies that describe experiences of illness, and evolves into a discussion of issues in contemporary medical practice. This second edition contains a new final chapter surveying pathographies that have appeared since the first edition (1992), and suggesting two additional illness myths. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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