Abstract
Drawing on research conducted among patients in Ireland, this article examines the narrative constructions of chronic kidney failure and explores the ways in which patient narratives cross-cut and subvert modernist medical constructions of transplantation as a therapeutic outcome, an endgame, a “gift of life.” In experience, patients dismantle this construction structure by emplotting their stories around the painful lack of an ending, ardently brought to bear by the lived realities of immunosuppressant drug therapy, the silent fears of graft rejection, and the isolation of recipiency. They articulate, instead, stories that disclose a multi-directional flow between past and future therapeutic interventions, between the altering nature of the renal body and personal experience. These storied dimensions are phenomenologically embedded in the sensory and temporal aspects of this condition as essential elements of chronic illness and as organizational properties of patient narratives.
References
Bauman, Zygmunt, 1992: Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Becker, Gay, and Sharon Kaufman, 1995: Managing an Uncertain Illness Trajectory in Old Age: Patients' and Physicians' Views of Stroke. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 9(2): 165–187.
Becker, Gay, and Sharon Kaufman, 1999: Disrupted Lives: How People Create Meaning in a Chaotic World. Berkeley: California University Press.
Bury, Michael, 1982: Chronic Illness as Biographical Disruption. Sociology of Health and Illness, 4: 167–182.
Bury, Michael, 1991: The Sociology of Chronic Illness: A Review of Research and Prospects. Sociology of Health and Illness 13: 451–468.
Cameron, Stewart, 1996: Kidney Failure: The Facts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carr, David, 1991: Time, Narrative and History: Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Charmaz, Kathy, 1993: Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Corbin, Alain, 1986: The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Csordas, Thomas, 1997: The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press.
DiGiacomo, Susan, 1987: Biomedicine as a Cultural System: An Anthropologist in the Kingdom of the Sick. In Encounters with Biomedicine. H. Baer, ed., pp. 315–346. New York: Gordon and Breach.
Eisenberg, Leon, 1977: Disease and Illness: Distinctions Between Professional and Popular Ideas of Sickness. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 1: 9–23
Fabrega, Horacio., Jr., 1974: Disease and Social Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Frank, Arthur, 1995: The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gaines, Atwood, 1979: Definitions and Diagnosis. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 3(4): 381–418.
Good, Byron, 1992: Culture, Diagnosis and Comorbidity. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 16(4): 427–446.
Good, Byron, 1994: Medicine, Rationality and Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Good, Byron, and Mary Jo Delvecchio Good, 1981: The Meaning of Symptoms: A Cultural Hermeneutic Model for Clinical Practice. In The Relevance of Social Science for Medicine. L. Eisenberg and A. Kleinman, eds., pp. 177–212, Dordrecht: Reidel.
Good, Mary Jo Delvecchio, 1995: American Medicine: The Quest for Competence. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Good, Mary Jo Delvecchio, Tseunetsuga Munakata, Yasuki Kobayashi, Cheryl Mattingly, Byron J. Good, 1994: Oncology and Narrative Time. Social Science and Medicine. 38: 855–862.
Haraway, Donna, 1991: Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books Ltd.
Howes, David, 1991: Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Source in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Kaufman, Sharon, 1988: Toward a Phenomenology of Boundaries in Medicine: Chronic Illness Experience in the Case of Stroke. Medical Anthropology Quarterly. 2: 338–354.
Kermode, Frank, 1967: The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford.
Kleinman, Arthur, 1978: Concepts and a Model for the Comparison of Medical Systems as Cultural Systems. Social Science and Medicine 12: 85–93.
Kleinman, Arthur, 1986: Rethinking Psychiatry. New York: Free Press.
Rethinking Psychiatry. New, 1988: The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books.
The Illness Narrat, 1999: Experience and its Moral Modes. In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Grethe Peterson, ed., pp. 357–420. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Leder, Drew, 1990: The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lock, Margaret, Allan Young, and Alberto Cambrosio, 2000: Living and Working with New Medical Technologies: Intersections of Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mattingly, Cheryl, 1994: Concept of Therapeutic Emplotment. Social Science and Medicine. 38(6): 811–822.
Mattingly, Cheryl, 1998: Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mauss, Maurice, 1967: The Gift. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1943: Phenomenology of Perception. Colin Smith, trans. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul.
Mishler, Eliot, 1984: The Discourse of Medicine: Dialectics of Medical Interviews. Norwood NJ: Ablex.
Mishler, Eliot, 1999: Storylines: Craft Artists' Narratives of Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Radley, Alan, 1993: Worlds of Illness: Biographical and Cultural Perspectives of Health and Disease. London: Routledge.
Radley, Alan, 1994: Making Sense of Illness: The Social Psychology of Health and Disease. London: Sage.
Ricoeur, Paul, 1980: Narrative Time. Critical Inquiry. 7(1): 169–190.
Rosaldo, Renato, 1989: Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. London: Routledge.
Serematakis, Nadia, 1994: The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Strauss, Anselm, 1975: Chronic Illness and the Quality of Life. St. Louis: C.V. Mosby.
Stoller, Paul, 1989: The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ware, Norma, 1999: Toward a Model of Social Course in Chronic Illness: The Example of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 23: 303–331.
Wiener, Carolyn, and Marilyn Dodd, 1993: Coping and Uncertainty: An Illness Trajectory Perspective. Scholarly Inquiry for Nursing Practice: An International Journal 7: 17–31.
Williams, Gareth H., 1984: The Genesis of Chronic Illness: Narrative Reconstruction. Sociology of Health and Illness 6: 174–200.
Williams, Gareth H., 1993: Chronic Illness and the Pursuit of Virtue in Everyday Life. In Worlds of Illness: Biographical and Cultural Perspectives of Health and Disease. Alan Radley, ed., pp. 92–108. London: Routledge.
Young, Katherine, 1997: Presence in the Flesh: Body in Medicine. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kierans, C. Narrating Kidney Disease: The Significance Of Sensation And Time In The Emplotment Of Patient Experience. Cult Med Psychiatry 29, 341–359 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-005-9171-8
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-005-9171-8