Making Sense of Illness

This 1998 book offers historical essays about how diseases change their meaning. Each of the diseases or etiologic hypotheses in this book has had a controversial and contested history: psychosomatic views of ulcerative colitis, twentieth-century chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme disease, angina pectoris, risk factors for coronary heart disease, and the type A hypothesis. At the core of these controversies are disagreements among investigators, clinicians, and patients over the best way to deal with what individuals bring to disease. By juxtaposing the history of the different diseases, the author shows how values and interests have determined research programs, public health activities, clinical decisions, and the patient's experience of illness. The approach is novel in its interweaving of historical research and the clinical experiences of the author. It should appeal to an audience of physicians, policy makers, social scientists and the general reader interested in broad intellectual currents in modern medicine.

"Making Sense of Illness succeeds as both a medical monograph and a book for the lay reader because it speaks to such deep matters of health and health care delivery, and accomplishes its task in relatively jargon-free language. This is a book for the thinking reader." The Washington Post, "This book will stimulate responses from both the ontologic and holistic camps...It should be especially appreciated by the new breed of academics incessantly involved in designing and redesigning the medical school curriculum." The New England Journal of Medicine, "The author of this very sensible book is no ideologue; he makes us think hard about interactions among social and biological determinants of disease meaning....Making Sense of Illness succeeds as both a medical monograph and a book for the lay reader because it speaks to such deep matters of health and health care delivery, and accomplishes its task in relatively jargon-free language. This is a book for the thinking reader." Harold J. Morowitz, The Washington Post, "Robert A. Aronowitz has written a challenging and most interesting short book perhaps best characterized as medical historicosociologic in scope...I hope that Making Sense of Illness will be widely read and discussed within our profession." Joseph S. Alpert, MD, JAMA, "...a doctor's effort to do justice...bringing us to our (clinical senses) so that we can appreciate the limits as well as the extent of our new knowledge." Robert Coles, The Lancet