American culture is an exceedingly optimistic one. We expect good news. We prize people with sunny dispositions. We accentuate the positive. We avoid discussion or acknowledgement of serious illness. If you are ignorant of trouble, we reason, you are freed from its burdens. The prospect of death is frightening. In mainstream American culture, as sociologist Arthur Frank argues in his noteworthy book The Wounded Storyteller, a lack of optimism leads to pessimism. Pessimism then leads to alienation, which in turn leads to a lack of well-being, which in the end makes us sick. If you get something as insidious as cancer, it must be your fault.

-Paul Stoller, Excerpt from Stranger In The Village Of The Sick

We just finished this book in my Medical Anthropology class, and Stollers descriptions of his treatment for lymphoma evoke a very poignant empathy. Whats most interesting to me is the perspective of an educated adult who is otherwise healthy, learning they have a chronic illness. In contrast to my own experiences with intensive medicine in my childhood, Stoller expresses significant distress over what I would have considered unpleasant, but simple, procedural things. There is certainly a small amount of brutality involved in western medicine even in the best scenarios, but I think understanding the why of the medical process makes that easier to deal with.