Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.
Cargando... Flesh and Blood: A History of My Family in Seven Sicknesses (edición 2018)por Stephen McGann (Autor)
Información de la obraFlesh and Blood: A History of My Family in Seven Maladies por Stephen McGann
Books Read in 2022 (2,823) Cargando...
Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Stephen McGann is best known as the beloved Dr. Turner on Call the Midwife but he is also an accomplished medical writer. He takes a unique approach to telling his family history in terms of the various health problems which plagued his family over the generations. It is very readable and leads to one wondering what impact health problems had on our own family stories. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Flesh and Blood is the story of the McGann family as told through seven maladies - diseases, wounds or ailments that have afflicted Steve's relatives over the last century and a half, and which have helped mould him into what he now perceives himself to be. It's the story of how health, or the lack of it, fuels our collective will and informs our personal narrative. Health is the motivational antagonist in the drama of our life story - circumscribing the extent of our actions, the quality of our character and the breadth of our ambition. Our maladies are the scribes that write the restless and mutating genome of our self-identity. Flesh and Blood combines McGann's passion for genealogy with an academic interest in the social dimensions of medicine - and fuses these with a lifelong exploration of drama as a way to understand what motivates human beings to do the things they do. He looks back at scenes from his own life that were moulded by medical malady, and trace the crooked roots of each affliction through the lives of his ancestors, whose grim maladies punctuate the public documents or military records of my family tree. In this way he asks a simple, searching question: how have these maladies helped to shape the story of the person he is today? No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Debates activosNingunoCubiertas populares
Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)306.461092241Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Specific aspects of culture Technology Medicine and health HistoryClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
¿Eres tú?Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing. |
So, it took a long time for me to return to reading this account of a family's history, as seen through the lens of illness, notably hunger, pestilence, exposure, trauma, breathlessness, heart problems and necrosis.
It's a tough list of diseases to write about, but McGann does it wonderfully. That his immediate and extended family have been touched not just by Hillsborough, but also by the sinking of the Titanic and the Alder Hey children's hospital scandal, is very unfortunate, but the lessons he draws from each, and from other episodes in his family's lives, are truly inspiring and the mark of a mature and thoughtful writer.
I want to say that this is family history writ large. It is, but at the same time it is more than that: it is family history writ well.
Recommended. ( )