Detalle Publicación

ARTÍCULO

Empathy in patient care: making a concept (1940-1959)

Título de la revista: MEDIC (METODOLOGIA DIDATTICA E INNOVAZIONE CLINICA)
ISSN: 1824-3991
Volumen: 25
Número: 1
Páginas: 25 - 31
Fecha de publicación: 2017
Resumen:
The paper contributes to the understanding of empathy by American psychosomatic medicine in the 1940s-1950s, the most important period in the development of this School. I will discuss what empathy is, how it works, and who is capable of performing it analysing stories of poliomyelitis patients and their parents. I will focus the study on the management of the emotional impact of the diagnosis of poliomyelitis, then considered a tragic diagnosis, in both patients and their parents. I also will refer to how the professionals, especially nurses, perceived the experience of illness in hospitalized patients, because of the interesting and disturbing impacts of these perceptions, from an empathic point of view. As we will know, narratives play a central role in the representation of empathy in the special link established between physicians and other health professionals and poliomyelitis patients, because of the relational quality of empathy. Thus, we will observe positive and negative aspects of the empathy in the clinical practices.
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