Abstract
Sociologists have studied the experience of illness for at least the past four decades (Conrad 1987). The earliest studies focused on how patients managed the sick role (Parsons 1951) or how they maneuvered through the stages of an illness career (Suchman 1965). Beginning with the work of Anselm Strauss and his colleagues (Glaser and Strauss 1965; Strauss and Glaser 1975), sociological researchers started investigating the experience of illness by examining the illness experience from the patient’s viewpoint. This has led to several lines of work that focused on how people live with and in spite of their illness, the subjective