Riessman Catherine Kohler
Department of Sociology & School of Social Work, Boston University, USA.
Sociol Health Illn. 2015 Sep;37(7):1055-71. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12281. Epub 2015 Apr 29.
First-person accounts of the illnesses experienced by sociologists have taken hybrid experimental forms. I add my voice to this growing tradition with a story about the discovery and treatment of a soft tissue sarcoma in my thigh, chronicled in a journal I kept over many months. The fragments scribbled in the journal became the basis of an extended illness narrative. I interrogate features of the narrative itself, including the handling of time and imagined audiences - those I was writing for. The illness narrative traces how cancer transformed the many identities I enact on a daily basis and how the invisible labour of particular health workers enabled the restoration of several prized identities. These workers - radiation, occupational and physical therapists - are typically subordinated in the medical hierarchy and the interactional work that they do with patients to restore and reconfigure ruptured identities after serious illness needs attention in medical sociology.
社会学家对自身疾病经历的第一人称叙述采用了混合实验形式。我通过讲述自己大腿部软组织肉瘤的发现与治疗经历，加入到这个不断发展的传统之中，这段经历记录在我数月来所写的一本日记里。日记中潦草写下的片段成为了一篇详尽的疾病叙事的基础。我审视了这一叙事本身的特点，包括对时间的处理以及想象中的受众——那些我为之写作的对象。这一疾病叙事追溯了癌症如何改变了我日常所扮演的诸多身份，以及特定医护人员的无形劳动如何促成了几种珍贵身份的恢复。这些医护人员——放疗师、职业治疗师和物理治疗师——在医疗等级制度中通常处于从属地位，而他们与患者为恢复和重新构建重病后破裂的身份所做的互动工作，在医学社会学中需要得到关注。
