Patient Encounters
The Experience of Disease
by James H. Buchanan, 1989 The table of contents for this book groups the chapters into diseases of the soul, metabolic furnaces, diseases of the heart, diseases of life, and acute and chronic diseases. The very first of these labels ought to tell the reader something- that this book is not the scientific book it purports to be. Buchanan avows that his stories are both true and fiction (the library of congress classifies it R726: nonfiction medicine). Each of these chapters is a poetic description of a case study of an illness. Some of the people described are real, some are not. They've all been falsified in the name of anonymity, but also in the name of poetic license.
These descriptions of "disease" are highly judgemental.
One of the diseases covered is AIDS: the case study is of a gay man who dies of AIDS and the narrator is clearly unfamiliar with the gay community; the community abandons this man, and his lifestyle is described by the narrator as sinful, and the last paragraph concludes that this is not a punishment, as though he were being merciful in saying so, as though it were a real possibility.
Another case study is about a woman whose son has progeria. Buchanan, attempting to report on the feelings of the mother and son, says that the mother is necessarily ashamed of her "monster". Buchanan again and again refers to the son with progeria as a monster.
Again and again, Buchanan's patients are helpless, humiliated, and monstrous.
Only skimworthy reading.
