Symptoms and Society: Ill-Health as Adjustment

Abstract

In the previous chapter I compared medical and social scientific approaches to the question of how people cope with coronary graft surgery and argued that they are not only different, but are in a changing relationship to one another. The need to understand how people live with ill health demands a way of seeing illness as part of social life and, consequendy, that the problem is defined from a perspective that does not rest solely upon the assumptions of medical science and practice. The purpose of this chapter is to set out such a perspective, showing how it arises from previous studies and then using it to frame questions about the experience of facing coronary graft surgery. In doing this it will be necessary to examine work relating to illness in general—not just to heart disease. There are two reasons for this: (1) we are taking a standpoint in “the illness of people” rather than in a disease entity of medicine and, (2) the development of theory requires concepts that address fundamental issues, not only the details of a particular illness. These matters, concerning how people become sick and manage illness over time, have been raised by investigators working in various subfields and are of direct relevance to the task of assembling the perspective presented here.