Anthropology of new chronicities: illness experiences under the promise of medical innovation as long-term treatment

Abstract

In the introduction to the special issue, Greco and Graber discuss the concept of chronicity and the ways it is used in the contributions to the special issue. Historians have shown that the concept of chronic disease has its origins in policy and has always been fluid and vague; however, the classic literature in sociology and nursing has focused on modelling the evolution of chronic disease rather than on examining the concept itself. In the introduction, chronicity is explored in the ways in which it is transformed by medical innovation. Innovations in biomedicine promise to turn terminal and acute conditions in chronic and to render chronic conditions curable. Even when such promises are not fulfilled, they change the context of the illness and the experiences of patients. In such a context a specific work is required from patients, in terms of adherence to the treatments, but also in terms of pursuing experimental treatments that could make their condition chronic. The introduction offers a critical exploration of the concept of chronicity, highlighting both its fluid definition and the changes linked to medical innovation, and the ways in which it shapes the temporalities and experiences of illness in complex ways that cannot be reduced to simplified schemas and trajectories.

Keywords:

• Chronicity
• chronic disease
• medical innovation
• patients’ experiences
• temporality

Acknowledgments

An early version of this text was presented at the workshop ‘Temporalities of the living: Health, disease and technology beyond the life course’, organised at the Université de Lausanne, December 4, 2020; we thank the participants for their useful feedback.

Ethical Approval

As this is an introduction that does not report original data, no Ethical Approval is involved.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy under Grant NF161448 and the Wellcome Trust under Grant 212736/Z/18/Z. This work was also supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under the Sinergia grant “Development of Personalised Health in Switzerland: Social Sciences Perspectives – DoPHiS” (no. CRSII5_180350).