Rachel Adams

Disability Life Writing and the Problem of Dependency in The Autobiography of Gaby Brimmer

Independence was a core value of the movement for disability rights. People with disabilities did not have to be dependent, advocates claimed; they were robbed of autonomy by poverty, social prejudice, and architectural barriers. Recently, critics have noted that the emphasis on independence equates personhood with autonomy, reason, and self-awareness, thereby excluding those who are incapable of self-determination. The stigma of dependency is communicated to caregivers whose work is devalued and undercompensated. These values are echoed in the life writing of people with disabilities, which tends to present a singular narrative voice, even when the author requires assistance in the physical or intellectual work of composition. The 1979 Mexican memoir-testimonio Gaby Brimmer, collaboratively authored by the acclaimed journalist Elena Poniatowska, Brimmer, her mother, and her paid caregiver is a notable exception. Consisting of interwoven dialogue among its three informants, Gaby Brimmer enacts dependency at the level of form, while exploring the challenges and opportunities of interdependence in societies that devalue the giving and receiving of care.

The physician–patient relationship in the age of precision medicine

The completion of the Human Genome Project was heralded as a step towards “personalized medicine,” offering patients individualized treatments based on genomic profiling. More recently, this vision has been eclipsed by the promise of “precision medicine” (PM), emphasizing benefits to patients from more precise diagnosis and treatment based on a range of biomarkers, along with data about patients’ environment, lifestyle, and behaviors. Cynics may object that PM is mostly hype and exists primarily in documents whose very titles—e.g., “Toward Precision Medicine”—indicate their promissory nature. We disagree. PM is part of a longstanding attempt to reorient medical diagnosis and treatment to take advantage of genomics research and other approaches leveraging big data, such as electronic medical record research and crowd-sourced health tracking. These efforts are progressively elaborating an increasingly coherent vision of a different kind of medicine. As the prospects and challenges of PM loom before us, there ais urgent need to consider its implications for the social organization of medicine, particularly for the physician–patient relationship.

Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (review)

versations with those closest to him, the sheer accumulation of useful detail is remarkable. While readers will, no doubt, miss a unified and compelling portrait of the complicated personality behind great canonical works like Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge, they will be forever indebted to this scrupulous and sympathetic critic for providing us with a sound basis for understanding the ins-andouts of Miller’s material world. And in that respect the book is, simply put, indispensable.