The Ubiquity of Chronic Illness

ABSTRACT

This is a review of five different books dealing with some aspect of what might be termed a “chronic illness” – Alzheimer’s disease, lupus, addiction, erectile dysfunction, and leprosy. The array of different subjects examined in these books points to the negotiable limits of this hugely open category. What exactly constitutes an “illness”? Why not use a less biomedical term instead: “disturbance”, “problem”, or simply “condition”? And how are we to understand “chronic” – simply as the flipside of “acute” or “curable”?

KEYWORDS:

• Chronic illness
• chronicity
• health systems
• long-term management
• rupture
• therapeutic trajectories

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claudia Fonseca

Claudia Fonseca is full professor in the Department of Post-Graduate Studies in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Her ethnographic field research among working-class families in Brazil has yielded studies on gender, kinship, and child circulation, and recently, on reparation for victims of Hansen’s disease subjected to enforced segregation.

Soraya Fleischer

Soraya Fleischer is professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Brasília, Brazil. Within the scope of medical anthropology, she works primarily with chronicity, pharmaceuticals and primary health care among urban poor.

Taniele Rui

Taniele Rui is a professor of anthropology at State University of Campinas, Brazil. Her anthropological research focuses primarily on intersections of the urban and the political, difference and inequality within cities as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and works in the fields of addiction, crime, poverty and social conflicts.