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The Meaning of Illness

A Phenomenological Account of the Different Perspectives of Physician and Patient

  • Book
  • © 1992

Overview

Authors:
  1. S. Kay Toombs

    1. Department of Philosophy, Baylor University, Waco, USA

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Part of the book series: Philosophy and Medicine (PHME, volume 42)

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Table of contents (4 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xvi
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  2. The Separate Worlds of Physician and Patient

    • S. Kay Toombs
    Pages 1-29

  3. Illness

    • S. Kay Toombs
    Pages 31-49

  4. The Body

    • S. Kay Toombs
    Pages 51-88

  5. The Healing Relationship

    • S. Kay Toombs
    Pages 89-119

  6. Back Matter

    Pages 121-165
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Keywords

About this book

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH My interest in exploring the nature of the patient's and the physician's understanding of illness has grown out of my own experience as a multiple sclerosis patient. In discussing my illness with physicians, it has often seemed to me that we have been somehow talking at cross purposes, discussing different things, never quite reaching one another. This inability to communicate does not, for the most part, result from inatten­ tiveness or insensitivity but from a fundamental disagreement about the nature of illness. Rather than representing a shared reality between us, illness represents two quite distinct realities - the meaning of one being significantly and distinctively different from the meaning of the other. In this work I shall suggest that psychological phenomenology provides the means to examine the nature of this fundamental disagreement between physician and patient in a rigorous fashion.! In particular, psychological phenomenology discloses the manner in which the of his or her experience. individual constitutes the meaning In providing a phenomenological description,2 the phenomenologist is committed to the effort to begin with what is given in immediate ex­ perience, to tum to the essential features of what presents itself as it presents itself to consciousness, and thereby to clarify the constitutive activity of consciousness and the sense-structure of experiencing.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Philosophy, Baylor University, Waco, USA

    S. Kay Toombs

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: The Meaning of Illness

  • Book Subtitle: A Phenomenological Account of the Different Perspectives of Physician and Patient

  • Authors: S. Kay Toombs

  • Series Title: Philosophy and Medicine

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2630-4

  • Publisher: Springer Dordrecht

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

  • Copyright Information: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1992

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-7923-1570-4Published: 31 May 1992

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-0-7923-2443-0Published: 31 August 1993

  • eBook ISBN: 978-94-011-2630-4Published: 11 November 2013

  • Series ISSN: 0376-7418

  • Series E-ISSN: 2215-0080

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XVI, 165

  • Topics: Philosophy of Medicine, Phenomenology, Psychiatry, Theory of Medicine/Bioethics

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