Is the way in which we perceive illness a development of the nineteenth century, when the calamitous epidemics of earlier times gave way to the new scourge of tuberculosis? The authors take an extraordinarily wide-ranging and provocative look at illness as a social phenomenon from the Middle Ages to the present- and uncover the multiple ideas and realities behind what we have come to call "a sick person." Drawing upon the history of medicine and mentalities, on literary representations as well as on hundreds of conversation with people suffering from or living with disease, the authors have explored the very different ways in which every society structures illness and the status of the ill in accord with its own values. And they have explicated the changing ways in which the sick have perceived the presence of illness in their own bodies, have absorbed the medical knowledge of their time, and have sought to give meaning to their sufferings. -- From Book Jacket.