Discourses of Disease

Discourses of Disease
Author: Howard Y. F. Choy
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2016-05-18
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9004319212

The meanings of disease have undergone such drastic changes with the introduction of modern Western medicine into China during the last two hundred years that new discourses have been invented to theorize illness, redefine health, and reconstruct classes and genders. As a consequence, medical literature is rewritten with histories of hygiene, studies of psychopathology, and stories of cancer, disabilities and pandemics. This edited volume includes studies of discourses about both bodily and psychiatric illness in modern China, bringing together ground-breaking scholarships that reconfigure the fields of history, literature, film, psychology, anthropology, and gender studies by tracing the pathological path of the “Sick Man of East Asia” through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the new millennium.

Post-AIDS Discourse in Health Communication

Post-AIDS Discourse in Health Communication
Author: Ambar Basu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000510611

This book examines the discourse of a "post-AIDS" culture, and the medical-discursive shift from crisis and death to survival and living. Contributions from a diverse group of international scholars interrogate and engage with the cultural, social, political, scientific, historical, global, and local consumptions of the term "post-AIDS" from the perspective of meaning-making on health, illness, and well-being. The chapters critique and connect meanings of "post-AIDS" to topics such as neoliberalism; race, gender, and advocacy; disclosure; relationships and intimacy; stigma and structural violence; family and community; migration; work; survival; normativity; NGOs, transnational organizations; aging and end-of-life care; the politics of ART and PrEP; mental illness; campaigns; social media; and religion. Using a range of methodological tools, the scholarship herein asks how "post-AIDS" or the "End of the Epidemic" is communicated and made sense of in everyday discourse, what current meanings are circulated and consumed on and around HIV and AIDS, and provides thorough commentary and critique of a "post-AIDS" time. This book will be an essential read for scholars and students of health communication, sociology of health and illness, medical humanities, political science, and medical anthropology, as well as for policy makers and activists.

A Book of Medical Discourses: in Two Parts

A Book of Medical Discourses: in Two Parts
Author: Rebecca Lee Crumpler
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2023-12-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 3385104378

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

Cinematic Prophylaxis

Cinematic Prophylaxis
Author: Kirsten Ostherr
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2005-11-16
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0822387387

A timely contribution to the fields of film history, visual cultures, and globalization studies, Cinematic Prophylaxis provides essential historical information about how the representation of biological contagion has affected understandings of the origins and vectors of disease. Kirsten Ostherr tracks visual representations of the contamination of bodies across a range of media, including 1940s public health films; entertainment films such as 1950s alien invasion movies and the 1995 blockbuster Outbreak; television programs in the 1980s, during the early years of the aids epidemic; and the cyber-virus plagued Internet. In so doing, she charts the changes—and the alarming continuities—in popular understandings of the connection between pathologized bodies and the global spread of disease. Ostherr presents the first in-depth analysis of the public health films produced between World War II and the 1960s that popularized the ideals of world health and taught viewers to imagine the presence of invisible contaminants all around them. She considers not only the content of specific films but also their techniques for making invisible contaminants visible. By identifying the central aesthetic strategies in films produced by the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and other institutions, she reveals how ideas about racial impurity and sexual degeneracy underlay messages ostensibly about world health. Situating these films in relation to those that preceded and followed them, Ostherr shows how, during the postwar era, ideas about contagion were explicitly connected to the global circulation of bodies. While postwar public health films embraced the ideals of world health, they invoked a distinct and deeply anxious mode of representing the spread of disease across national borders.

Analysing Health Communication

Analysing Health Communication
Author: Gavin Brookes
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2021-05-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 303068184X

This edited book showcases original research in the study of healthcare and health communication, while also providing a detailed overview of contemporary methods of discourse analysis. Discourse approaches remain under-represented in the field of health communication, despite their potential for affording detailed understanding of health-related text and talk across an array of contexts, for example in face-to-face and digital healthcare encounters, health promotion, and patients’ accounts of illness experiences. This book aims to address this gap in the literature by offering the first book-length treatment of different approaches to discourse analysis in health(care) and illness contexts, and it will appeal both to linguists and to researchers in nursing and health sciences, sociology and anthropology.

Writing at the Margin

Writing at the Margin
Author: Arthur Kleinman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 1997-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780520919471

One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate. Writing at the Margin explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems—for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain—are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it, the social institutions relating to it, and the way it is configured in medical ethics. Previously published in various journals, these essays have been revised, updated, and brought together with an introduction, an essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.

Curing Their Ills

Curing Their Ills
Author: Megan Vaughan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2013-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0745668941

Curing their Ills traces the history of encounters between European medicine and African societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vaughan's detailed examination of medical discourse of the period reveals its shifting and fragmented nature, highlights its use in the creation of the colonial subject in Africa, and explores the conflict between its pretensions to scientific neutrality and its political and cultural motivations. The book includes chapters on the history of psychiatry in Africa, on the treatment of venereal diseases, on the memoirs of European 'Jungle Doctors', and on mission medicine. In exploring the representations of disease as well as medical practice, Curing their Ills makes a fascinating and original contribution to both medical history and the social history of Africa.

Material Discourses of Health and Illness

Material Discourses of Health and Illness
Author: Lucy Yardley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1134773811

Material Discourses of Health and Illness applies discursive approaches to the field of health psychology, in stark contrast to the bio-medical model of health and illness. The discursive approach uses the person's experience and feelings as the central focus of interest, whereas the more traditional models regarded these as coincidental and relatively unimportant. The book provides an accessible and compelling introduction to social constructionist and discursive approaches to those with limited previous knowledge of socio-linguistic theory and research. It provides practical examples of how these approaches can be applied to the field of health psychology with a collection of sophisticated discursive analyses which demonstrate the distinctive contribution that can be made by psychologists to a field that has been largely dominated by sociologists and anthropologists.

Mammographies

Mammographies
Author: Mary K. DeShazer
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2018-05-09
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0472900986

While breast cancer continues to affect the lives of millions, contemporary writers and artists have responded to the ravages of the disease in creative expression. Mary K. DeShazer’s book looks specifically at breast cancer memoirs and photographic narratives, a category she refers to as mammographies, signifying both the imaging technology by which most Western women discover they have this disease and the documentary imperatives that drive their written and visual accounts of it. Mammographies argues that breast cancer narratives of the past ten years differ from their predecessors in their bold address of previously neglected topics such as the link between cancer and environmental carcinogens, the ethics and efficacy of genetic testing and prophylactic mastectomy, and the shifting politics of prosthesis and reconstruction. Mammographies is distinctive among studies of contemporary illness narratives in its exclusive focus on breast cancer, its analysis of both memoirs and photographic texts, its attention to hybrid and collaborative narratives, and its emphasis on ecological, genetic, transnational, queer, and anti-pink discourses. DeShazer’s methodology—best characterized as literary critical, feminist, and interdisciplinary—includes detailed interpretation of the narrative strategies, thematic contours, and visual imagery of a wide range of contemporary breast cancer memoirs and photographic anthologies. The author explores the ways in which the narratives constitute a distinctive testimonial and memorial tradition, a claim supported by close readings and theoretical analysis that demonstrates how these narratives question hegemonic cultural discourses, empower reader-viewers as empathic witnesses, and provide communal sites for mourning, resisting, and remembering.