Nancy L. Diekelmann – författare

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 by noted scholars question commonly held assumptions in contemporary healthcare that underlie oppressive power dynamics and even violence for patients and their families. The contributors discuss such topics as women and violence, life-support technologies, and healthcare professionals' own experiences as patients. First, Do No Harm opens the discourse for reaching new understandings, from reassessing the meaning of ""quality of life"" to questioning the appropriateness of the very language used by healthcare professionals. It will be welcomed by healthcare workers and by scholars in nursing, medicine, and the allied health sciences.

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.

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, and understanding. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that understanding the suffering of the ""other"" reveals something vital about the moral courage required to heal - and stay humane - in the face of suffering.