The historical prominence of people who are suffering have suffered because of disease is the subject of the book entitled “The experience of falling ill in a historical perspective” whichhas just been published by the Editorial de la Universidad de Granada (EUG), edited by Professors Teresa Ortiz, Guillermo Olagüe, Esteban Rodríguez, Alfredo Menéndez, Eugenia Gil, Marco A. Luna, Maite Sevilla and Antonio J. Gómez.
The volume has collected detailed summaries of the works accepted to be presented and discussed in the XIV Conference of the Spanish Society of History of Medicine, held in Granada between the 11th and the 14th of June 2008. Such works deal to a great extent with those who suffer or have suffered because of disease as, according to the persons in charge of the Conference, it is about “incorporate their voices and look for their perspective to explore the image they construct of their own body in health and in disease, the professional and social relationships they establish during their healing process, the way in which the scientific points of view contribute to form the individual appreciation of health and disease and also to get to know their resistance or assimilation of the technical monopoly, their vulnerability in front of the sanitary risks, their ability to demand attention, to question or transform the sanitary organization and to move their personal and collective experiences to the political body”.
The book includes more than one hundred works of different disciplines, from the experience of falling ill in different places of the world to the fear of contagion, subjectivity and mental disorder, or the historical analysis, as well as other of different thematic nature very specific: the literature as a source for historiogrphy of the Colombian patients in the work of García Márquez; Between medical utopia and women’s sexual practices; or the Intersubjectivity, cholera and slavery in colonial Cuba; The therapeutical use of pain; or The health in the hands of citizens. The case of the protection against the chemical weapons in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War.
Reference: Professor Teresa Ortiz Gómez. Department of Pathological Anatomy and History of Science. University of Granada (Spain). Phone numbers: 958 243513 and 958 242381. E-mail: tortiz@ugr.es