Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History (Health and Medicine in American Society) [Hardcover]

Charles E. Rosenberg (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1992 | Series: Health and Medicine in American Society

"In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it," writes Charles E. Rosenberg in his introduction to this stimulating set of essays. Disease is both a biological and a social phenomenon. Patient, doctor, family, and social institutions--including employers, government, and insurance companies--all find ways to frame the biological event in terms that make sense to them and serve their own ends. Many diseases discussed here--endstage renal disease, rheumatic fever, parasitic infectious diseases, coronary thrombosis--came to be defined, redefined, and renamed over the course of several centuries. As these essays show, the concept of disease has also been used to frame culturally resonant behaviors: suicide, homosexuality, anorexia nervosa, chronic fatigue syndrome. Disease is also framed by public policy, as the cases of industrial disability and forensic psychiatry demonstrate. Medicl institutions, as managers of people with disease, come to have vested interests in diagnoses, as the histories of facilities to treat tuberculosis or epilepsy reveal. Ultimately, the existence and conquest of disease serve to frame a society's sense of its own "healthiness" and to give direction to social reforms. The contributors include Steven J. Peitzman, Peter C. English, John Farley, Christopher Lawrence, Michael Macdonald, Bert Hansen, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Robert A. Aronowitz, Gerald Markowitz, David Rosner, Janet A. Tighe, Barbara Bates, Ellen Dwyer, John M. Eyler, and Elizabeth Fee. Charles Rosenberg is Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Janet Golden is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press (March 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813517567
• ISBN-13: 978-0813517568
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,009,820 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What is Disease?, April 6, 2000

By 

Richard Valasek "Valasek" (Pearl City, HI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History (Dilemmas in World Politics) (Paperback)

Charles Rosenberg states in his introduction to this collection of essays "In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it." What follows are 14 separate accounts of this process of negotiation in naming and responding to disease and the ever-shifting boundaries of the notion of disease.

This book should be required reading for anyone involved in the healing arts be they physicians, nurse, medical social worker, shaman or lay healer. It should also be read by anyone who has to deal with these people on a regular basis.

Reading these essays makes it very clear that there is not Grand Narrative of dieseas, no solid ground of meaning. Physicians and other healers often act as the Keepers of Meaning in naming our conditions and interpreting it for us. But there are many forces at work involving such things as ecomnomics, social role, public policy, entitlement. I am reminded of a recent new story where parents in posh neighborhoods now go shopping for "diseases" for their children so they can be entitled to advantages on the SAT and therefore have even more ready access to the better colleges. Here the physician enters into collusion with the affluent patient to use "disease" as a means to shore up and assure social status.

Framing Disease though presents more earnest and honest efforts to catalogue our experience of illness.