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

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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.