Autobiography of a Disease

"[Thsi book] documents, in an experimental form, the experience of extended life-threatening illness in contemporary US hospitals and clinics. The narrative is based primarly on the author's ... collapse into a coma and long hospitalization thirteen years ago; but it has also been crafted from twelve years of reserach on the history of microbiology, literary representations of illness and medical treatments, cultural analysis of MRSA in the popular press, and extended autoethnographic work on medicalization. ... [It] blends the genres of storytelling, ethnography and memoir ... [It] is told from the perspective of a bacterial cluster. This orientation is intended to represent the distribution of perspectives on illness, disability, and pain across subjective centers - from patient to monitoring machine, from body to cell, from caregiver to cared-for - and thus makes sense of illness only in a social context."--Back cover.