Autobiography Of A Disease

Author : Patrick Anderson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2017-06-09
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9781351720991

Get Book

Autobiography of a Disease by Patrick Anderson Pdf

Autobiography of a Disease documents, in experimental form, the experience of extended life-threatening illness in contemporary US hospitals and clinics. The narrative is based primarily on the author’s sudden and catastrophic collapse into a coma and long hospitalization thirteen years ago; but it has also been crafted from twelve years of research on the history of microbiology, literary representations of illness and medical treatment, cultural analysis of MRSA in the popular press, and extended autoethnographic work on medicalization. An experiment in form, the book blends the genres of storytelling, historiography, ethnography, and memoir. Unlike most medical memoirs, told from the perspective of the human patient, Autobiography of a Disease is told from the perspective of a bacterial cluster. This orientation is intended to represent the distribution of perspectives on illness, disability, and pain across subjective centers—from patient to monitoring machine, from body to cell, from caregiver to cared-for—and thus makes sense of illness only in a social context.

Author : Patrick Anderson
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2017-06-09
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9781351721004

Get Book

Autobiography of a Disease by Patrick Anderson Pdf

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- CONTENTS -- Foreword -- Prelude -- Part I -- Part II -- Part III -- Part IV -- Part V -- Part VI -- Coda -- Afterword -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Author : Brett L. Walker
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2018-03-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780295743042

Get Book

A Family History of Illness by Brett L. Walker Pdf

While in the ICU with a near-fatal case of pneumonia, Brett Walker was asked, “Do you have a family history of illness?”—a standard and deceptively simple question that for Walker, a professional historian, took on additional meaning and spurred him to investigate his family’s medical past. In this deeply personal narrative, he constructs a history of his body to understand his diagnosis with a serious immunological disorder, weaving together his dying grandfather’s sneaking a cigarette in a shed on the family’s Montana farm, blood fractionation experiments in Europe during World War II, and nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks that ravaged small American towns as his ancestors were making their way west. A Family History of Illness is a gritty historical memoir that examines the body’s immune system and microbial composition as well as the biological and cultural origins of memory and history, offering a startling, fresh way to view the role of history in understanding our physical selves. In his own search, Walker soon realizes that this broader scope is more valuable than a strictly medical family history. He finds that family legacies shape us both physically and symbolically, forming the root of our identity and values, and he urges us to renew our interest in the past or risk misunderstanding ourselves and the world around us.

Author : Paul Davies
Publisher : AuthorHouse
Page : 77 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2012-02-22
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781467008969

Get Book

Living with Crohn’S Disease a Story of Survival: Autobiography by Paul Davies by Paul Davies Pdf

My name is Paul, and Ive suffered with Crohns Disease for thirty years. This is my story of how Ive survived. It includes the agony I went through for eighteen months before being diagnosed with CD, what drove me over the edge to try and take my own life one cold and bleak December night, and why smoking cannabis helped relieve my symptoms but soon turned into a serious drug addiction and a different lifestyle that wasnt me. Ive learnt how to deal with the emotional side a lot better now, and whether you are a patient or a friend of a patient, please remember to stay positive. You will have bad days, but when the good days do come, live and enjoy them to the full. This is what keeps me going.

Author : Thomas Fleming
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2013-05-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9780306822018

Get Book

A Disease in the Public Mind by Thomas Fleming Pdf

By the time John Brown hung from the gallows for his crimes at Harper's Ferry, Northern abolitionists had made him a “holy martyr” in their campaign against Southern slave owners. This Northern hatred for Southerners long predated their objections to slavery. They were convinced that New England, whose spokesmen had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leader of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern “slavocrats” like Thomas Jefferson. This malevolent envy exacerbated the South's greatest fear: a race war. Jefferson's cry, “We are truly to be pitied,” summed up their dread. For decades, extremists in both regions flung insults and threats, creating intractable enmities. By 1861, only a civil war that would kill a million men could save the Union.

Author : Susan Sontag
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 1988
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:602245135

Get Book

Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag Pdf

Author : Einat Avrahami
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0813926653

Get Book

The Invading Body by Einat Avrahami Pdf

Widely debated in feminist, poststructuralist, and literary theory is the relationship between subjectivity and the body. Yet autobiographical criticism--an obvious place for testing this conceptual relationship--has lagged behind contemporary queries about the embodied self. In The Invading Body, Einat Avrahami corrects this deficiency by analyzing the genre of terminal illness autobiographies. These personal narratives challenge the world of self-writing in their power to question the assumption that autobiography--and the body--are products of cultural constructs and discursive practices. Their self-disclosures of symptoms, disabilities, and the physical and psychological pains of treatment, especially when combined with thoughts of further deterioration and imminent death, defy the theoretical formulations of identity and alter the definition of autobiography itself. Avrahami investigates an array of autobiographical testimonies of terminal illness ranging from Harold Brodkey's poignant account of his struggle with AIDS to Hannah Wilke's and Jo Spence's gripping self-portraits of cancer. By challenging the artificial and contrived skepticism that critics and theorists bring to their concepts of the self, the author argues, these illness narratives constitute an "invasion of the real," confronting the notions of self-representation and self-invention on which current autobiographical studies are based. The author's examinations of these moving memoirs and photographs will engage not only the growing field of disability studies, but also a more general readership interested in the transition that occurs when one's body suddenly falls out of step with one's mind.

Author : Anne Finger
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
Page : 357 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2013-09-17
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 9781466852969

Get Book

Elegy for a Disease by Anne Finger Pdf

During the first half of the twentieth century, epidemics of polio caused fear and panic, killing some who contracted the disease, leaving others with varying degrees of paralysis. The defeat of polio became a symbol of modern technology's ability to reduce human suffering. But while the story of polio may have seemed to end on April 12, 1956, when the Salk vaccine was declared a success, millions of people worldwide are polio survivors. In this dazzling memoir, Anne Finger interweaves her personal experience with polio with a social and cultural history of the disease. Anne contracted polio as a very young child, just a few months before the Salk vaccine became widely available. After six months of hospitalization, she returned to her family's home in upstate New York, using braces and crutches. In her memoir, she writes about the physical expansiveness of her childhood, about medical attempts to "fix" her body, about family violence, job discrimination, and a life rich with political activism, writing, and motherhood. She also writes an autobiography of the disease, describing how it came to widespread public attention during a 1916 epidemic in New York in which immigrants, especially Italian immigrants, were scapegoated as being the vectors of the disease. She relates the key roles that Franklin Roosevelt played in constructing polio as a disease that could be overcome with hard work, as well as his ties to the nascent March of Dimes, the prototype of the modern charity. Along the way, we meet the formidable Sister Kenny, the Australian nurse who claimed to have found a revolutionary treatment for polio and who was one of the most admired women in America at mid-century; a group of polio survivors who formed the League of the Physically Handicapped to agitate for an end to disability discrimination in Depression-era relief projects; and the founders of the early disability-rights movement, many of them polio survivors who, having been raised to overcome obstacles and triumph over their disabilities, confronted a world filled with barriers and impediments that no amount of hard work could overcome. Anne Finger writes with the candor and the skill of a novelist, and shows not only how polio shaped her life, but how it shaped American cultural experience as well.

Author : Siddhartha Mukherjee
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 624 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2011-08-09
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 9781439170915

Get Book

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee Pdf

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

Author : Molly Haskell
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : Cytomegalovirus infections
ISBN : 9780595140404

Get Book

Love and Other Infectious Diseases by Molly Haskell Pdf

My husband awoke one night with a fever of 105.9. I rushed him to the Emergency room of a New York hospital, and there began a six month drama in which doctors tried to figure out what was wrong with him, while I alternated between hope and despair. For the three months that Andrew remained critically ill and deranged, hallucinating most of the time, he was no longer the lover, friend, fellow critic and confidant I was used to. Eleven years my senior, Andrew had been my mentor as a writer and established film critic, and now I might be on my own. Terrified by the possibility of Andrew's death and forced by that terror to look inward, I began to see the extent of my dependency on a marriage that had seemed perfectly equal, perfect in fact. I think of the book as both a thriller and love story: a hospital suspense melodrama as it tracks the ups and downs of a husband's illness, and the memoir of a marriage that focuses on my own spiritual and psychological journey.

Author : Andrew W. Artenstein
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2009-12-11
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781441911087

Get Book

Vaccines: A Biography by Andrew W. Artenstein Pdf

Why another book about vaccines? There are already a few extremely well-written medical textbooks that provide comprehensive, state-of-the-art technical reviews regarding vaccine science. Additionally, in the past decade alone, a number of engrossing, provocative books have been published on various related issues ra- ing from vaccines against specific diseases to vaccine safety and policy. Yet there remains a significant gap in the literature – the history of vaccines. Vaccines: A Biography seeks to fill a void in the extant literature by focusing on the history of vaccines and in so doing, recounts the social, cultural, and scientific history of vaccines; it places them within their natural, historical context. The book traces the lineage – the “biography” – of individual vaccines, originating with deeply rooted medical problems and evolving to an eventual conclusion. Nonetheless, these are not “biographies” in the traditional sense; they do not trace an individual’s growth and development. Instead, they follow an idea as it is conceived and dev- oped, through the contributions of many. These are epic stories of discovery, of risk-takers, of individuals advancing medical science, in the words of the famous physical scientist Isaac Newton, “by standing on the shoulders of giants. ” One grant reviewer described the book’s concept as “triumphalist”; although meant as an indictment, this is only partially inaccurate.

Author : Ben Watt
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2014-02-13
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781408846599

Get Book

Patient by Ben Watt Pdf

In 1992, Ben Watt, a member of the band Everything But The Girl, contracted a rare life-threatening illness that baffled doctors and required months of hospital treatment and operations. This is the story of his fight for survival and the effect it had on him and those nearest him. 'In the summer of 1992, on the eve of a trip to America, I was taken to a London hospital with bad chest pain and stomach pains. They kept me in for two and half months. I fell very ill – about as ill it is possible to be without actually dying – confronting a disease hardly anyone, not even some doctors, had heard of. People ask what was it like, and I say yes, of course it was dramatic and graphic and all that stuff, but at times it was just kind of comic and strange. It was, I suppose, my life-changing story.'

Author : Porochista Khakpour
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2018-06-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780062428721

Get Book

Sick by Porochista Khakpour Pdf

A Best Book of the Year: Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, The Paris Review, and LitHub. Time Magazine's Best Memoirs of 2018 • Boston Globe's 25 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018 • Buzzfeed's 33 Most Exciting New Books • GQ Best Non Fiction Book of 2018 • Bustle’s 28 Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2018 list • Nylon’s 50 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018 • Electric Literature’s 46 Books to Read By Women of Color in 2018 “Porochista Khakpour’s powerful memoir, Sick, reads like a mystery and a reckoning with a love song at its core. Humane, searching, and unapologetic, Sick is about the thin lines and vast distances between illness and wellness, healing and suffering, the body and the self. Khakpour takes us all the way in on her struggle toward health with an intelligence and intimacy that moved, informed, and astonished me.” — Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild A powerful, beautifully rendered memoir of chronic illness, misdiagnosis, addiction, and the myth of full recovery. For as long as author Porochista Khakpour can remember, she has been sick. For most of that time, she didn't know why. Several drug addictions, some major hospitalizations, and over $100,000 later, she finally had a diagnosis: late-stage Lyme disease. Sick is Khakpour's grueling, emotional journey—as a woman, an Iranian-American, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed health problems—in which she examines her subsequent struggles with mental illness and her addiction to doctor prescribed benzodiazepines, that both aided and eroded her ever-deteriorating physical health. Divided by settings, Khakpour guides the reader through her illness by way of the locations that changed her course—New York, LA, Santa Fe, and a college town in Germany—as she meditates on the physiological and psychological impacts of uncertainty, and the eventual challenge of accepting the diagnosis she had searched for over the course of her adult life. A story of survival, pain, and transformation, Sick candidly examines the colossal impact of illness on one woman's life by not just highlighting the failures of a broken medical system but by also boldly challenging our concept of illness narratives.

Author : Paul Kalanithi
Publisher : Random House
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2016-01-12
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780812988413

Get Book

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi Pdf

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.

Author : Susannah Cahalan
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2012-11-13
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780141975351

Get Book

Brain On Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan Pdf

'My first serious blackout marked the line between sanity and insanity. Though I would have moments of lucidity over the coming days and weeks, I would never again be the same person ...' Susannah Cahalan was a happy, clever, healthy twenty-four-year old. Then one day she woke up in hospital, with no memory of what had happened or how she had got there. Within weeks, she would be transformed into someone unrecognizable, descending into a state of acute psychosis, undergoing rages and convulsions, hallucinating that her father had murdered his wife; that she could control time with her mind. Everything she had taken for granted about her life, and who she was, was wiped out. Brain on Fire is Susannah's story of her terrifying descent into madness and the desperate hunt for a diagnosis, as, after dozens of tests and scans, baffled doctors concluded she should be confined in a psychiatric ward. It is also the story of how one brilliant man, Syria-born Dr Najar, finally proved - using a simple pen and paper - that Susannah's psychotic behaviour was caused by a rare autoimmune disease attacking her brain. His diagnosis of this little-known condition, thought to have been the real cause of devil-possessions through history, saved her life, and possibly the lives of many others. Cahalan takes readers inside this newly-discovered disease through the progress of her own harrowing journey, piecing it together using memories, journals, hospital videos and records. Written with passionate honesty and intelligence, Brain on Fire is a searingly personal yet universal book, which asks what happens when your identity is suddenly destroyed, and how you get it back. 'With eagle-eye precision and brutal honesty, Susannah Cahalan turns her journalistic gaze on herself as she bravely looks back on one of the most harrowing and unimaginable experiences one could ever face: the loss of mind, body and self. Brain on Fire is a mesmerizing story' -Mira Bartók, New York Times bestselling author of The Memory Palace Susannah Cahalan is a reporter on the New York Post, and the recipient of the 2010 Silurian Award of Excellence in Journalism for Feature Writing. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, and is frequently picked up by the Daily Mail, Gawker, Gothamist, AOL and Yahoo among other news aggregrator sites.