The Illness Narrative: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition

This book should be of value to anyone dealing with the problem of chronic illness; and who in the practice of medicine these days does not? Kleinman, a psychiatrist with considerable skill in ethnography, has artfully defined the dilemmas and issues in chronicity—in illness, disease, and sickness. By "illness" Kleinman refers to the "innately human experience of symptoms and suffering" (p 3); "disease," to the practitioner's concern with biologic structure and functioning (p 5); and "sickness," to "the understanding of a disorder in its generic sense across a population in relation to macrosocial (economic, political, institutional) forces" (p 6). The distinctions among these definitions as well as the significant themes in chronicity are built up by the writer in an easy and understandable style around case presentations drawn from a wide variety of clinical settings in the United States and China. The health care system is increasingly preoccupied with long-term