2 Department of Anesthesia, Stanford University School of Medicine, and Anesthesia Service, Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, California, USA In 2000, the Arts and Humanities ...

Jane Austen’s letters describe a two-year deterioration into bed-ridden exhaustion, with unusual colouring, bilious attacks and rheumatic pains. In 1964, Zachary Cope postulated tubercular Addison’s ...

School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work, Queens University Belfast, Belfast, UK Heart transplantation is now the accepted therapy for end-stage heart failure that is resistant to medical ...

Illness narratives have traditionally been used as a conceptual tool for exploring experiences of chronic illness or disease. In this paper, I suggest that Frank's typology of illness narratives ...

The Cost of Dying Exhibition: public, professional and political reactions to a visual exhibition depicting experiences of poverty at the end of life ...

The impact of social and material conditions on mental health is well established but lacking in a coherent approach. We offer the concept of ‘vitality’ as means of describing how environments ...

The nineteenth century science of teratology concerned itself with the study of malformations or “monstrosities”, as they were then called. The first major contribution to the field was the work of ...

Essayist Susan Sontag alerted us more than 20 years ago to the way in which clusters of metaphors attach themselves to our discussion of certain diseases, and the influence these metaphors exert on ...

There is increasing evidence for the efficacy of non-medical strategies to improve mental health and well-being. Get into Reading is a shared reading intervention which has demonstrable acceptability ...

Clinical language applied to early pregnancy loss changed in late twentieth century Britain when doctors consciously began using the term ‘miscarriage’ instead of ‘abortion’ to refer to this subject.

Among the growing number of works of graphic fiction, a number of titles dealing directly with the patient experience of illness or caring for others with an illness are to be found. Thanks in part to ...

Correspondence to Dr Jennifer Jane Hardes, Department of Sociology, Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent CT1 1QU, UK; jennifer.hardes{at}canterbury.ac.uk The positive relationship between ...