Palliative care requires a high level of communication to build understanding and empathy
between clinician and patient, and to negotiate the dialectics that become apparent in a …

Palliative care, a health specialty concerned with 'dying, life-limiting prognosis, and end-of-
life planning'(10), is gaining public and institutional awareness worldwide. As conversations …

For American literary critic Anatole Broyard, a prostate cancer diagnosis produced a creative
spark of writings about his illness. In his memoir Intoxicated by my illness, published after his …

A quest to establish meaning in the face of illness and mortality from a perspective that
includes, yet at the same time exceeds, medical knowledge led neurosurgeon in residence …

This book will be the first of its kind to offer intensive conversation analysis on patient-
clinician interactions in the context of palliative medicine. The book focuses on a series of …

This article investigates an emerging practice in palliative care: dignity therapy. Dignity
therapy is a psychotherapeutic intervention that its proponents assert has clinically …

In his end-of-life memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi raises
questions that preoccupy the narrator of any story worth telling: where do I stand in relation …

Methods In writing patients' stories, I tried not to become enmeshed in their symptomatic
needs but sought to uncover the person, family and situation within the palliative care …

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag (1991) argued that the best approach to describing
illness was the one 'most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking'(3). Her initial …

Focusing on illness narratives, this chapter analyses how patient-writers use language to
translate the corporeal experience of illness and, in the process, how they express what it …