Includes bibliographical references (pages 303-333) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: What is Eros? -- Part One. The contraries: The ambush: an erotics of illness -- Un-forgetting Asklepios: medical Eros and its lineage -- Not-knowing: medicine in the dark -- Part Two. The stories: Varieties of erotic experience: five illness narratives -- Eros Modigliani: assenting to life -- The infinite faces of pain: Eros and ethics -- Part Three. The dilemmas: The black-swan syndrome: probable improbabilities -- Light as environment: how not to love nature -- The spark of life: appearances / disappearances -- Conclusion: Altered states.
Summary:
Eros and Illness explores the place of desire in illness. We urgently need such an exploration because illness is no longer simply a natural feature of the human condition. Most people fall ill, but illness now falls under the supervision of biomedicine, a science-based, state-regulated system dominated by the new molecular gaze. The use of a person's distinctive genetic data to guide treatment and to forestall disease--called "personalized medicine"-- reflects how the molecular gaze can produce valuable advances in biomedical healthcare. What does this indispensable super-vision, however, tend to overlook? Eros and Illness proposes that biomedicine ignores, in clinical practice and in bench science, the powerful role of desire in illness. Desire, always double-edged, requires attention because it can do both great harm and great good. Patients, caregivers, family members, and physicians, as they recognize the role of desire, gain access to a power that can make the passage through illness much less onerous and far more healing: truly "personalized." -- Provided by publisher
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.