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--And a Time to Die
A penetrating examination of how most Americans die today--how the patients and their families' conflicting desires about a "good death" collide with the politics and routines of American hospitals.
Ordinary Medicine
Most of us want and expect medicine’s miracles to extend our lives. In today’s aging society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to see—it’s being obscured by a perfect storm created by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries, along with insurance companies. In Ordinary Medicine Sharon R. Kaufman investigates what drives that storm’s “more is better” approach to medicine: a nearly invisible chain of social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that has made once-extraordinary treatments seem ordinary, necessary, and desirable. Since 2002 Kaufman has listened to hundreds of older patients, their physicians and family members express their hopes, fears, and reasoning as they faced the line between enough and too much intervention. Their stories anchor Ordinary Medicine. Today’s medicine, Kaufman contends, shapes nearly every American’s experience of growing older, and ultimately medicine is undermining its own ability to function as a social good. Kaufman’s careful mapping of the sources of our health care dilemmas should make it far easier to rethink and renew medicine’s goals.
The Ageless Self
Among the many studies of aging and the aged, there is comparatively little material in which the aged speak for themselves. In this compelling study, Sharon Kaufman encourages just such expression, recording and presenting the voices of a number of old Americans. Her informants tell their life stories and relate their most personal feelings about becoming old. Each story is unique, and yet, presented together, they inevitable weave a clear pattern, one that clashes sharply with much current gerontological thought. With this book, Sharon Kaufman allows us to understand the experience of the aging by listening to the aged themselves. Kaufman, while maintaining objectivity, is able to draw an ...
And a Time to Die
Most Americans, when pressed, have a vague sense of how they would like to die. They may imagine a quick and painless end or a gentle passing away during sleep. Some may wish for time to prepare and make peace with themselves, their friends, and their families. Others would prefer not to know what's coming, a swift, clean break. Yet all fear that the reality will be painful and prolonged; all fear the loss of control that could accompany dying. That fear is justified. It is also historically unprecedented. In the past thirty years, the advent of medical technology capable of sustaining life without restoring health, the expectation that a critically ill person need not die, and the convictio...
The Healer's Tale
Medical anthropologist Kaufman (U. of Calif., San Francisco) interviewed seven doctors, eminent in their fields, and trained during the 1920s and 1930s. She interviewed them between 1987 and 1989 (they were all between the 80-83 years old), seeking their life stories and their feelings and thinking about the shape of American medical education and care today. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Real Love
In Real Love, one of the world's leading authorities on love tells us how to find it, how to nurture it, how to honor it—and most of all how to rethink it ... This book has the power to set your heart at peace.' —Susan Cain, author of Quiet What is love? Sharon Salzberg believes that love is a powerful healing force for us all, and that modern associations with romance and adoration are limiting. By redefining love, she helps us to recognize our desire for happiness and enhance our connections with each other. Real Love is a creative toolkit of mindfulness exercises and meditation techniques that can help you to truly engage with your present experience and create deeper love relationships - with yourself, your partner, friends and family, and with life itself. The book encourages us to strip away layers of negative habits and obstacles and to improve deeper connections, helping us to experience authentic love based on direct experience, rather than preconceptions.
Bodies in the Making
In the twenty-first century, the body is experienced less as a fixed entity than it is as a protean product and a project of technological, medical and artistic invention. The essays in Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations address the proliferation of such transformative practices as tattooing, piercing, self-cutting, cosmetic and transsexual surgery, prosthetics, organ transplants and life extension technologies. Establishing links among these varied practices, the contributors illuminate the dramatic and widespread changes that have taken place across generations in attitudes towards the relation of the body to the mind, to agency and to subjectivity. Bodies in the Making also addresses a paradox that has shaped recent body modification debates. Although physical transformations are usually experienced as self-expressive and libratory, they are frequently understood to be socially determined, economically driven and culturally enmeshed. Contributors to the volume engage this contradiction directly, exploring ways in which diverse body practices are capable of subverting power while also at times re-inscribing it.
Learning to be Old
Describes beliefs, customs, and traditions surrounding aging in America and suggests that awareness of these social construcitons can help women resist their negative impact. After critiquing cultural myths, ageism, the politics of aging, and mainstream gerontology, she proposes a feminist "gerastology" in which older women "including minorities and lesbians) interview their peers as part of the research agenda.
Women, Body, Illness
This provocative and moving work explores concepts of body and space to better understand the daily lives and struggles of women with chronic illness. Moss and Dyck show how such women--coping with associated notions of illness, health, and being female--restructure their physical and social environments through the strategies they choose to accommodate disabling illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple sclerosis, or rheumatoid arthritis. Strategies might include disclosing or concealing illness from employers and friends; seeking or rejecting emotional support through old friends and new contacts; and pursuing or resisting specific diagnoses from the biomedical community. Featuring a wealth of original research and personal stories, Women, Body, Illness tells the tales of chronically ill women forging networks of support, redefining themselves, and challenging what it is to be ill.
Thinking about Dementia
Cultural responses to most illnesses differ; dementia is no exception. These responses, together with a society's attitudes toward its elderly population, affect the frequency of dementia-related diagnoses and the nature of treatment. Bringing together essays by nineteen respected scholars, this unique volume approaches the subject from a variety of angles, exploring the historical, psychological, and philosophical implications of dementia. Based on solid ethnographic fieldwork, the essays employ a cross-cultural perspective and focus on questions of age, mind, voice, self, loss, temporality, memory, and affect. Taken together, the essays make four important and interrelated contributions to...
