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(2001) Handbook of phenomenology and medicine, Dordrecht, Springer.
Disease
the phenomenological and conceptual center of practical-clinical medicine
Per Sundström
pp. 109-126
In an ordinary English dictionary, chosen at random, you may read: "Someone who is ill is suffering from a disease or health problem which makes them unable to work or to live normally" (Collins, 1987, p. 721). Such a down-to-earth explication of illness says little or nothing about how it feels to fall, and to be, ill. And it does not tell you anything about that forbidding existential fact which infects any serious illness: being ill, seriously ill, is being lost and trapped in your self, your own weak self, which finds itself bereft of a world to care for and inhabit, and so unable to care for anything or anyone except itself, i.e., your self, which confines you to itself-your petty self.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-0536-4_6
Full citation:
Sundström, P. (2001)., Disease: the phenomenological and conceptual center of practical-clinical medicine, in S. K. Toombs (ed.), Handbook of phenomenology and medicine, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 109-126.
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