Works of Illness: Narrative, Picturing and the Social Response to Serious Disease (Axis Series)

Works of Illness takes a fresh look at illness by examining the role of artworks in the understanding of and response to serious disease. The special contribution of this book is to focus upon pictures, narratives and dramatic performance as ways of giving shape to illness experience, communicating this to others, and influencing social action in order to mitigate suffering. It shows how the aesthetic dimension of such representations is key to understanding the relationship of the world of illness to that of health. Works of Illness is an original interdisciplinary study that draws upon medical sociology, the philosophy of art, and discussions of ethics to offer a new theory of how serious illness is made social.