Passage Through Crisis

Based on a study of fourteen families in which a child had contracted paralytic poliomyelitis, Passage Through Crisis, first published in 1963, was widely praised for its penetrating--and, for its time, innovative--analyses of doctor-patient communications, and for its interpretation of the meaning of physical disability in American society.This book retains for today's readers that essential quality that most engaged readers upon its original publication: its vivid and probing ethnographic account of the impact of serious illness on the family, the difficult processes of adjustment that ensue and, in these connections, the role played (and toll exacted) by American values.