Product Description

This text examines the struggle to achieve recognition of complaints and disabilities that many contend are related to "manufactured environments". It explores the arising political, legal and medical conflicts and the relationship between illness and the modern environment.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1906667 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 237 pages

Review
"A fascinating blend of empirical research on the illness experiences of people with multiple chemical sensitivity. Through their extensive fieldwork, the authors have greatly enhanced our understanding of the human body and its complex relationship to the medical, scientific, and governmental establishment. Bodies in Protest graphically captures the sufferers first experience symptoms, defines their mysterious illnesses, and forces us to expand our thinking about the chemical plagues of modern technological society." - Phil Brown, Department of Sociology, Brown University

From the Publisher
EXAMINATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL ILLNESS AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

"Gulf War Syndrome: Is It a Real Disease?" asks a recent headline in the New York Times. This question--are certain diseases real?--lies at the heart of a simmering controversy in the United States, a debate that has raged, in different contexts, for centuries. In the early nineteenth century, the air of European cities, polluted by open sewers and industrial waste, was generally thought to be the source of infection and disease. Thus the term miasma--literally deathlike air--came into popular use, only to be later dismissed as medically unsound by Louis Pasteur.

While controversy has long swirled in the United States around such illnesses as chronic fatigue syndrome and Epstein-Barr virus, no disorder has been more aggressively contested than environmental illness, a disease whose symptoms are distinguished by an extreme, debilitating reaction to a seemingly ordinary environment. The environmentally ill range from those who have adverse reactions to strong perfumes or colognes to others who are so sensitive to chemicals of any kind that they must retreat entirely from the modern world.

BODIES IN PROTEST does not seek to answer the question of whether or not chemical sensitivity is physiological or psychological, rather, it reveals how ordinary people borrow the expert language of medicine to construct lay accounts of their misery. The environmentally ill are not only explaining their bodies to themselves, however, they are also influencing public policies and laws to accommodate the existence of these mysterious illnesses. They have created literally a new body that professional medicine refuses to acknowledge and one that is becoming a popular model for rethinking conventional boundaries between the safe and the dangerous.

Having interviewed dozens of the environmentally ill, the authors here recount how these people come to acknowledge and define their disease, and themselves, in a suddenly unlivable world that often stigmatizes them as psychologically unstable. BODIES IN PROTEST is the dramatic story of human bodies that no longer behave in a manner modern medicine can predict and control.

Steve Kroll-Smithis Director of the Environmental Social Science Research Institute and Professor of Sociology at the University of New Orleans. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.
H. Hugh Floyd is Professor of Sociology at Samford University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Georgia.

Customer Reviews

Thought Provoking Account
Bodies In Protest is an account of how people with environmental illness attempt to makes sense of a mysterious disease the medical profession, with few exceptions, failes to recognize. It is very well-written and insightful. I learned a lot about the day to day problems of living with the illness and how difficult it is for people who suffer from it to live dignified lives. I suspect there will be plenty of science about this disease, but little human empathy for those who have it. This book is an effort to provide a human face to environmental illness. That it does so while also being theoretically evocative is a feather in the cap of the authors.