Eros and illness: a caregiver's tale
- Date
2017-03-15
- Main contributor
University of Virginia. School of Medicine
- Summary
-
The caregiver—whether a family member pressed into service or an underpaid home-care aide—is a representative figure of our time. This status is paradoxical because actual caregivers (so often female) do their work largely out of sight and almost in secret. It is an uncanny representative figure whom we do not see. Writer and scholar David Morris spent over a decade as caregiver for his late wife, Ruth, a medical librarian who in her mid-fifties began to show signs of dementia, most likely earlier-onset Alzheimer’s disease. In this Medical Center, Morris describes his experience but also uses his personal caregiving as a fulcrum for opening up larger questions about what biomedicine often overlooks in its molecular vision of illness. Desire is the neglected force that Morris sees as basic to illness, and it is the role of desire in illness that he seeks to clarify. Desire, it turns out, also offers an unanticipated common ground where health-care professionals—caregivers too in their medical role—may meet with patients and families in mutual, richer understanding. A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
- Contributors
Morris, David B. (Speaker); Childress, Marcia Day (Moderator); University of Virginia. School of Medicine
- Publisher
Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
- Genre
Filmed lectures
- Subjects
Desire (philosophy); Medicine and psychology; Sick--Psychology
- Collection
Medical Center Hour
- Unit
Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
- Language
English
- Terms of Use
The speakers in this presentation have given the University of Virginia permission to make it freely accessible online for all audiences to view. To request permission to reproduce, republish, and/or repost this presentation please contact the Historical Collections and Services Department of the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library at the University of Virginia.
- Physical Description
1 online resource (1 video file, 63:25 min.) : sound, color
Access Restrictions
This item is accessible by: the public.