Wayne A. Beach, Conversations about illness: Family preoccupations with bulimia. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996. Pp. vii, 148. Hb $36.00, pb $16.00.

Abstract

Within the fields of health communication and medical sociology, there is growing interest in exploring the social and interactional character of health and illness. This interest results, in large part, from the recognition that the very foundations of a society's notions of health are inextricably rooted in the social. With the present book, we have one of the first interactional studies of a family's experience with a particular illness: bulimia. Beach provides a glimpse into the way that family members both talk about, and talk into being, the health problems of one of its members. Removing the notion of illness from the individual, psychological experience is not an especially novel idea; but Beach's location of it in the interactional details of a conversation between a grandmother and granddaughter is quite notable.