Here is a thoroughly updated edition of a classic in palliative medicine. Two new chapters have been added to the 1991 edition, along with a new preface summarizing where progress has been made and where it has not in the area of pain management. This book addresses the timely issue of doctor-patient relationships arguing that the patient, not the disease, should be the central focus of medicine. Included are a number of compelling patient narratives. Praise for the first edition "Well (...) written. . .should be read by everyone in medical practice or considering a career in medicine."---JAMA. "Memorable passages, important ideas, and critical analysis. This is a book that clinicians and educators should read."---New England Journal of Medicine. (shrink)

The contribution of the humanities to medicine is considered, with attention to the classic view, existing programs in medical school, and obstacles to continued or increased participation by the humanities. A shift is occurring in medicine toward a primary concern for sick persons, instead of disease alone. Specific values of teaching literature, historical referents, philosophy, the tools of teaching, communication skills, and reasoning are identified. Literature offers the opportunity to see the interplay of illness and persons, including the role of (...) physicians in the lives of others and the perception of physicians by laypersons. In addition to providing a historical context for viewing medicine and science, history provides a methodology and understanding of time and process. Teaching doctors how to think about both the body and about persons (i.e., the objective and subjective, data and values) in formulating patient care goals allows them to integrate knowledge of medical science, the body, and the everyday life and function of individual sick persons. It is argued that medicine has demands to make of the humanities that may exceed what humanists are willing to or able to offer. In the process of meeting medicine's changing needs, humanities' view of their own nature and function may also change. (SW). (shrink)

In this remarkable book Michel Foucault, one of the most influential thinkers of recent times, calls us to look critically at specific historical events in order to uncover new layers of significance.

" Dr. Cassell discusses the world of the sick, the healing connection and healer's battle, the role of omnipotence in the healer's art, illness and disease, and ...

Early in the first volume of his Ideen zu einer reinen Phiinomeno logie und phiinomenologischen Philosophie, Edmund Husserl stated concisely the significance and scope of the problem with which this present study is concerned. When we reflect on how it is that consciousness, which is itself absolute in relation to the world, can yet take on the character of transcendence, how it can become mundanized, We see straightaway that it can do that only by means of a certain participation in (...) transcendence in the first, originary sense, which is manifestly the transcendence of material Nature. Only by means of the experiential relation to the animate organism does consciousness become really human and animal (tierischen), and only thereby does it achieve a place in the space and in the time of Nature. l Consciousness can become "worldly" only by being embodied within the world as part of it. In so far as the world is material Nature, consciousness must partake of the transcendence of material Nature. That is to say, its transcendence is manifestly an embodiment in a material, corporeal body. Consciousness, thus, takes on the characteristic of being "here and now" (ecceity) by means of experiential (or, more accurately, its intentive) relation to that corporeal being which embodies it. Accordingly, that there is a world for consciousness is a conse quence in the first instance of its embodiment by 2 that corporeal body which is for it its own animate organism. (shrink)

Zaner's "contributions" are expository, critical, and original, in that order of extension. The major part of the text is taken up with an exposition and criticism of the theories of embodiment of Marcel, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, with a strong emphasis on the unacknowledged borrowings of the latter two from Marcel-and, to a less obvious, but equally as important extent, of all three from Bergson. "Embodiment" is taken as a technical term referring to the on-going process by which consciousness relates itself (...) to the world in and through its body. Zaner is sharply critical of what he regards as the ontological bias of each of the three men whose theory of embodiment he examines; for while he is willing to admit the central importance of this problem to philosophy as a whole, he regards an ontological handling of it as a subversion of the ontological neutrality of the phenomenological methods developed by Husserl. The original section of the book outlines a program for a "descriptive-explicative analysis" of the phenomenon of embodiment along basically Husserlian lines, and is extremely suggestive, though highly condensed. An extensive appendix includes the original texts of the major passages cited throughout the book.—E. A. R. (shrink)

Medicine and ethics alike must learn properly to attend to suffering. We can never truly experience another's distress. We can, however, learn to recognize the particular purposes, values, and aesthetic responses that shape the sense of self whose integrity is threatened by pain, disease, and the mischances of life.