You Are a Number, Not a Human Being
Israeli Breast Cancer Patients' Experiences with the Medical Establishment
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2478562 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Susan Sered, Susan Starr Sered (0000-0002-5348-1624, Bar-Ilan University), Ephraim Tabory (Bar-Ilan University) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 223-252 |
| Publication date | 1999-06-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Medical Anthropology Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0745-5194 • E-ISSN: 1548-1387 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1525/maq.1999.13.2.223 |
| PMID | 10440031 |
| OpenAlex | W2118194799 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 13 |
| References cited | 19 |
In the course of interviews with Israeli women who had recently been treated for breast cancer, we found that our informants tended to offer us "treatment narratives" rather than, or sometimes in addition to, the "illness narratives" made famous by Arthur Kleinman. For the women we interviewed, treatment narratives constitute verbal platforms on which to explore what it means to be human during a period in which one's body, spirit, and social identity are undergoing intense transformations. A central theme in these narratives is the Hebrew word yachas, loosely translated as "attitude,""attention," or "relationship." The women consistently contrasted the good yachas of medical staff who treated them "like humans" or like "real friends" with the bad yachas of staff who treated them like numbers, machines, or strangers. We argue that the women used language (in various contexts) as a means of resisting the medical culture's pattern of treating patients as "nonhumans."[breast cancer, relationship, language, total institution
Aesthetics · Breast cancer · Cancer · Hebrew · Identity (music · Institution · Linguistics · Narrative · Social science · Sociology · Theme (computing · Classics · Empathy and Medical Education · Gender Studies · History · Internal Medicine · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Medicine · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Social Psychology
Etnografías
Institutions, Agency, and Illness in the Making of Tourette Syndrome
What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger”
The ‘invisible scars’ of breast cancer treatments (Respond to this article at http
The Commodification of the Body and its Parts
American Acupuncture and Efficacy
Evaluating Illness in Women's Magazines
Encounters in Cancer Treatment
Suffering in a productive world
Playing the numbers
Holistic sickening
Being Heard and Remembered
The Ritualization of Rehabilitation
Postmodernism, sociology and health
Medical power and social knowledge
Greedy institutions
Knowledge, Power, and Practice
The Category of the person
Pain as Human Experience
Communal Webs
Implicit Meanings
Medicine, rationality, and experience
Women and Mental Health Policy
Shaping the Constitution of Knowledge Producing Communities
Neanderthals "R" Us
Self, identity and the naming question
How are you
Topic transitions in physician-patient interviews
Asylums
I can't tell you all my troubles
On Key Symbols1
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2000 - 2025 (26) |
| Highly cited | No |