Culture, Experience, Care: Re-Centring the Patient

Book excerpt: This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. Susan Sontag claimed that ‘everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well, and the kingdom of the sick,’ and while ‘we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.’ We are all, in other words, past, present, or future patients. This collection examines the many ways in which the idea of the patient can be conceptualized in different cultural, professional, intellectual, and emotional contexts as part of an on-going, multidisciplinary and international attempt by scholars, health care professionals, and, indeed, patients themselves to rethink and re-examine patienthood and patient care. These chapters attempt to put the patient at the centre: not just (although clearly not least) at the centre of the processes, institutions, and ideologies of medical care, but of a wide range of intellectual and social practices.