Medicine finally has discovered fatigue. Recent articles about various diseases conclude that fatigue has been underrecognized, underdiagnosed, and undertreated. Scholars in the social sciences and ...humanities have also ignored the phenomenon. As a result, we know little about what it means to live with this condition, especially given its diverse symptoms and causes. Emily K. Abel offers the first history of fatigue, one that is scrupulously researched but also informed by her own experiences as a cancer survivor. Abel reveals how the limits of medicine and the American cultural emphasis on productivity intersect to stigmatize those with fatigue. Without an agreed-upon approach to confirm the problem through medical diagnosis, it is difficult to convince others that it is real. When fatigue limits our ability to work, our society sees us as burdens or worse. With her engaging and informative style, Abel gives us a synthetic history of fatigue and elucidates how it has been ignored or misunderstood, not only by medical professionals but also by American society as a whole.
Hospices have played a critical role in transforming ideas about death and dying. Viewing death as a natural event, hospices seek to enable people approaching mortality to live as fully and ...painlessly as possible. Award-winning medical historian Emily K. Abel provides insight into several important issues surrounding the growth of hospice care. Using a unique set of records,Prelude to Hospiceexpands our understanding of the history of U.S. hospices. Compiled largely by Florence Wald, the founder of the first U.S. hospice, the records provide a detailed account of her experiences studying and caring for dying people and their families in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although Wald never published a report of her findings, she often presented her material informally. Like many others seeking to found new institutions, she believed she could garner support only by demonstrating that her facility would be superior in every respect to what currently existed. As a result, she generated inflated expectations about what a hospice could accomplish. Wald's records enable us to glimpse the complexities of the work of tending to dying people.
Though notorious for its polluted air today, the city of Los Angeles once touted itself as a health resort. After the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1876, publicists launched a campaign ...to portray the city as the promised land, circulating countless stories of miraculous cures for the sick and debilitated. As more and more migrants poured in, however, a gap emerged between the city's glittering image and its dark reality.
Emily K. Abel shows how the association of the disease with "tramps" during the 1880s and 1890s and Dust Bowl refugees during the 1930s provoked exclusionary measures against both groups. In addition, public health officials sought not only to restrict the entry of Mexicans (the majority of immigrants) during the 1920s but also to expel them during the 1930s.
Abel's revealing account provides a critical lens through which to view both the contemporary debate about immigration and the U.S. response to the emergent global tuberculosis epidemic.
What is it like to live with—and love—someone whose death, while delayed, is nevertheless foretold? In Living in Death’s Shadow , Emily K. Abel, an expert on the history of death and dying, examines ...memoirs written between 1965 and 2014 by family members of people who died from chronic disease. In earlier eras, death generally occurred quickly from acute illnesses, but as chronic disease became the major cause of mortality, many people continued to live with terminal diagnoses for months and even years. Illuminating the excruciatingly painful experience of coping with a family member’s extended fatal illness, Abel analyzes the political, personal, cultural, and medical dimensions of these struggles. The book focuses on three significant developments that transformed the experiences of those dying and their intimates: the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, the growing use of high-tech treatments at the end of life, and the rise of a movement to humanize the care of dying people. It questions the exalted value placed on acceptance of mortality as well as the notion that it is always better to die at home than in an institution. Ultimately, Living in Death’s Shadow emphasizes the need to shift attention from the drama of death to the entire course of a serious chronic disease. The chapters follow a common narrative of life-threatening disease: learning the diagnosis; deciding whether to enroll in a clinical trial; acknowledging or struggling against the limits of medicine; receiving care at home and in a hospital or nursing home; and obtaining palliative and hospice care. Living in Death’s Shadow is essential reading for everyone seeking to understand what it means to live with someone suffering from a chronic, fatal condition, including cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease.
After the Cure Abel, Emily; Subramanian, Saskia
09/2008
eBook
2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title2009 Association of American University Presses Award for Jacket DesignChemo brain. Fatigue. Chronic pain. Insomnia. Depression. These are just a few of the ...ongoing, debilitating symptoms that plague some breast-cancer survivors long after their treatments have officially ended. While there are hundreds of books about breast cancer, ranging from practical medical advice to inspirational stories of survivors, what has been missing until now is testimony from the thousands of women who continue to struggle with persistent health problems.After the Cure is a compelling read filled with fascinating portraits of more than seventy women who are living with the aftermath of breast cancer. Emily K. Abel is one of these women. She and her colleague, Saskia K. Subramanian, whose mother died of cancer, interviewed more than seventy breast cancer survivors who have suffered from post-treatment symptoms. Having heard repeatedly that "the problems are all in your head," many don't know where to turn for help. The doctors who now refuse to validate their symptoms are often the very ones they depended on to provide life-saving treatments. Sometimes family members who provided essential support through months of chemotherapy and radiation don't believe them. Their work lives, already disrupted by both cancer and its treatment, are further undermined by the lingering symptoms. And every symptom serves as a constant reminder of the trauma of diagnosis, the ordeal of treatment, and the specter of recurrence.Most narratives about surviving breast cancer end with the conclusion of chemotherapy and radiation, painting stereotypical portraits of triumphantly healthy survivors, women who not only survive but emerge better and stronger than before. Here, at last, survivors step out of the shadows and speak compellingly about their "real" stories, giving voice to the complicated, often painful realities of life after the cure.This book received funding from the Susan G. Komen Foundation.
The history of medicine is much more than the story of doctors, nurses, and hospitals. Seeking to understand the patient's perspective, historians scour the archives, searching for rare personal ...accounts. Bringing together a trove of more than 400 family letters by Charles Dwight Willard,Suffering in the Land of Sunshineprovides a unique window into the experience of sickness.A Los Angeles civic leader at the turn of the twentieth century, Willard is well known to historians of the West, but exclusively for his public life as a booster and reformer. Willard's evocative story offers fresh insights into several critical issues, including how concepts of gender, class, and race shape patients' representations of their illness, how expectations of cure affect the illness experience, how different cultures constrain the coping strategies of the sick, and why robust health is such an exalted value in certain societies.
Drawing on a large cache of letters to John and Frances Gunther after the death of their son as well as memoirs and fiction by bereaved parents, this essay challenges the assumptions of ...secularization that infuse histories of twentieth-century American medicine. Many parents who experienced the death of children during the postwar period relied heavily on religion to help make sense of the tragedies medicine could not prevent. Parental accounts included expression of belief in divine intervention and the power of prayer, gratitude for God's role in minimizing suffering, confidence in the existence of an afterlife, and acceptance of the will of God. Historians seeking to understand how parents and families understood both the delivery of medical care and the cultural authority of medical science must integrate an understanding of religious experiences and faith into their work.
After a brief discussion of early-and mid-nineteenth-century hospitals, this article focuses on the years between 1880 and 1939, when those facilities underwent a major transformation and the ...proportion of hospital deaths steadily increased. During both periods, private hospitals refused admission to many seriously ill people and discharged others when death approached. City hospitals dumped poor patients with advanced disease on chronic care facilities and especially on almshouses. With each transfer, the quality of care sharply declined. And trips from one institution to another often inflicted additional suffering; some accelerated death.
Public health officials contributed to the early 20th-century campaign against Mexicans and Filipinos in Los Angeles. In 1914, the newly established city and county health departments confronted the ...overwhelming task of building a public health infrastructure for a rapidly growing population spread over a large area. However, for several years public health reports focused almost exclusively on the various infectious diseases associated with Mexican immigrants. Although the segregation of Mexicans was illegal in California until 1935, county officials established separate clinics for Whites and Mexicans during the 1920s. With assistance from state officials, local health authorities participated actively in efforts to restrict Mexican immigration throughout the 1920s and to expel both Mexicans and Filipinos during the 1930s.
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