Segnaliamo la recente pubblicazione del volume dal titolo Cure and Care, a cura di Lorenzo Speranza e Angela Palmieri, Supplemento 2017 della rivista Medicina nei Secoli. Arte e Scienza, edita da Sapienza Università Editrice (il pdf è scaricabile al seguente link).
Abstract. In this volume some reflections on healing as a relational process involving both, “cure” and “care”, are presented. The first describes the elimination of the cause of a disease from an exclusively technical point of view; the second concerns a combination of informal procedures of assistance based on elements such as attention, encouragement, support, compassion. Curing and caring are medical practices by definition, but the two concepts have not always gone hand-in-hand. Often they have been considered as two mutually exclusive terms and therefore alternatively connected to different social actors. Nursing and medicine, for instance, have been seen, and in many ways still are, as two classical examples of professions with opposite attitudes towards caring and curing. Drawing on researches carried out in Italy, Russia and Usa, and on a interdisciplinary approach fostered by the participation to this journal of authors such as sociologists, anthropologist, social workers, pedagogists, physicians, psychiatrists and psycologists, this issue of “Medicina nei secoli” tries to show that the difference of professions is not the only variable involved in shaping caring and curing attitudes. Other variables are concerned. Race, gender, projects of professionalization, different kinds of sickness, social and political changes, national peculiarities, all of them work together to complicate the unilateral occupational expectations. Cure, today, perhaps cannot exist without care and there are not so specific and clear cut distinctions anymore.