The announcement of a serious diagnosis is a solemn moment when directions shift, priorities change, and life appears in sharper focus. It is also a moment when a story takes shape. It is a story we are able to imagine, even if we haven’t experienced it firsthand, because the moment of diagnosis is as pervasive in popular media as it is in medicine.

Diagnosis: Truths and Tales shares stories told from the perspectives of those who receive diagnoses and those who deliver them. Confronting how we address illness in our personal lives and in popular culture, this compelling book explores narratives of diagnosis while pondering the impact they have on how we experience health and disease.

Diagnosis: Truths and Tales shares stories written from the perspectives of both those who receive diagnoses and those who deliver them, and confronts how we address illness in our personal lives and in popular media.

List of Illustrations
Foreword: Giving the Story Back – by Lisa Sanders
Acknowledgments

Introduction

Touch of the Flu:
The Paradoxes and Contradictions of Diagnoses Whose Stories?
Narrative Exchange and Self-Diagnosis "The Expertness of His Healer":
Diagnosis, Disclosure, and the Power of a Profession "The News Is Not Altogether Comforting": Fiction and the Diagnostic Moment Breaking Bad:
The Diagnostic Moment in Film and Television – with Thierry Jutel A Picture Paints a Thousand Words:
The Graphic Diagnosis – with Ian Williams The Intellectual Documentary:
Methods for Understanding the Diagnostic Moment What’s There to Tell? Diagnosis-as-Mystery

Notes
References
Index

"Diagnosis: Truth and Tales provokes thought rather than simple assent. It offers a set of ideas that enable its readers’ various responses rather than prescribing an inevitable conclusion."