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  How well do we look after people who are seriously sick? Astonishingly, research is scant – which makes Neil Vickers and Derek Bolton's ambitious new book very welcome . . . Being Ill stands out not only for its original perspective but for the non-judgemental tone of its authors.

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  New Scientist

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  Being Ill is a carefully argued and scholarly work that demands close attention and careful reading . . . illuminating and pioneering

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  The Lancet

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  Nuanced and wide-ranging . . . [a] major contribution, which deserves to be widely and closely read.

  '

  Quarterly Review of Biology

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  An extremely rich book – rich in learning and methodology, rich in examples, rich in important insight . . . It brings inspiration in the conceptual analysis that it offers of a fundamental concept like care . . . Being Ill is not just a rich book, it’s an important one as well, one that deserves to receive an audience that goes far beyond the scholarly domain of health and medical humanities.

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  The Polyphony

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  a must-read – a powerful, interdisciplinary masterpiece . . . explore[s] what it truly means to fall ill – not only physically, but emotionally, socially, and existentially . . .Being Ill is a call: it challenges healthcare professionals, and aid providers to go beyond technical solutions. Gratitude to Neil Vickers and Derek Bolton who through this book teach us to be better carers.

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  Chronicle of Healthcare and Narrative Medicine

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  Being Ill is an in-depth discussion of how individualistic societies, particularly those in the West, ignore illness. Vickers and Bolton pay careful attention to the relational aspects of illness. They divide their topic into four sections, any one of which could stand alone as a course reading. . . . In these sections, there is as much reference to scientific study as to memoir and literature, making a compelling argument for this entry in the medical humanities. This title will be of particular interest to those in disability studies, though the content is also relevant for those in sociological and medical disciplines. Recommended.

  '

  Choice

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  [A] nuanced and wide-ranging account . . . [and] major contribution, which deserves to be widely and closely read.

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  Attachment

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  A pioneering volume. For our ageing population, varieties of illness have become headline news, an ever-present talking-point for which we badly need fresh thinking. Subtle, sympathetic and wide-ranging, Vickers and Bolton demonstrate how the reach of medical humanities can be extended by empathy and health science. This study of the 'collective psychobiological' dimensions of illness is radical in its implications. Potentially, it offers a new way forward for our understanding of the ways the human animal interrelates in sickness and in health.

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  Robert McCrum, author of Every Third Thought: On Life, Death and the Endgame

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  Vickers and Bolton elucidate the contradiction between the human need for caring relationships and people’s tendency to pull away from those who are ill and disabled. They assemble the broadest range of studies—from infant research to microsociology to neurology and epigenetics—to explain why relationships between the healthy and the ill are often fraught. Readers who seek a scientific basis for medical humanities will find much of value here.

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  Arthur W. Frank, Ph.D., author of At the Will of the Body and The Wounded Storyteller

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  The reaction to illness, our own and that of others to whom we are close, reveals much of what it means to be human and live in society. Such is the theme of this humane and scholarly study which has much to say about the fundamentals of caring for others, both when they are ill, and when they are well.

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  Michael Marmot, Director UCL Institute of Health Equity

Introduction
1: Emergent Illness
2: Care
3: The Pariah Syndrome
4: Biopsychosocial Beings
Conclusion
References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index

Neil Vickers (Author)
Neil Vickers is Professor of English Literature and the Health Humanities at King’s College London. He has had a career in epidemiology and has published widely on literature and medical subjects. He is the author of Coleridge and the Doctors (2004).

Derek Bolton (Author)
Derek Bolton is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Psychopathology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. He is the author of several books including What Is Mental Disorder? (2008) and The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease (with Grant Gillett, 2019).