These interpretative studies are a beginning - a questioning that gathers practitioners, students, teachers, scholars, and citizens into persistent thinking and conversation around complex contemporary issues. First, Do No Harm shows how health care professionals, with the best intentions of providing excellent, holistic health care, can nonetheless perpetuate violence against vulnerable patients. These essays investigate the need to rethink contemporary healthcare practices in ways that can bring the art and science of medicine back into sorely needed balance. These ground-breaking studies...

This work challenges educators to think in new ways about health professionals' educational environment and the roles played by learners, teachers and the recipients of health care.

Many Voices explores the relationships and the tensions at the intersection between caring, in the context of health, and culture. As the social voices of diverse interest groups are increasingly acknowledged in healthcare, ideological friction between goals of assimilation and of diversity and multiculturalism remains unsolved. Caring (or its opposite, neglect) mediates in health-related encounters in ways that are often described more rhetorically than realistically. Here are the issues as they are experienced.

"Beyond Method" provides a forum for scholars across health and human sciences disciplines to explore issues surrounding philosophy, methodology, and epistemology in the context of interpretive scholarship. The essays comprising this volume move beyond the practical descriptions or the "how to" of interpretive methods commonly found in textbooks to explore the contributions, underlying assumptions, limitations, and possibilities embedded within and across particular philosophical, methodological, and epistemological perspectives. They reveal the complexity and richness of understanding that...

Compelling, timely, and essential reading for healthcare providers, Meaning in Suffering addresses the multiplicity of meanings suffering brings to all it touches: patients, families, health workers, and human science professionals. Examining suffering in writing that is both methodologically rigorous and accessible, the contributors preserve first-hand experiences using narrative ethnography, existential hermeneutics, hermeneutic phenomenology, and traditional ethnography. They offer nuanced insights into suffering as a human condition experienced by persons deserving of dignity,...

Compelling, timely, and essential reading for healthcare providers, "Meaning in Suffering" addresses the multiplicity of meanings suffering brings to all it touches: patients, families, health workers, and human science professionals. Examining suffering in writing that is both methodologically rigorous and accessible, the contributors preserve first-hand experiences using narrative ethnography, existential hermeneutics, hermeneutic phenomenology, and traditional ethnography. They offer nuanced insights into suffering as a human condition experienced by persons deserving of dignity, empathy,...