Field Guide to Falling Ill: Essays (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780300282948)

From the inaugural winner of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, a riveting exploration of illness and medicine that imagines a more humane form of care

"What was wrong with them? That's what we wanted to know." So begins Jonathan Gleason's prizewinning collection of essays on the human lives behind the corporate, legal, and cultural practices that shape disease. Drawing on his experiences as a medical interpreter and patient, and on a decade of historical research, he illuminates a stunning range of topics, including the racial dimensions of organ donation, the past and present of the AIDS crisis, the troubled relationship between state violence and mental illness, and the trial of a doctor accused of murdering his patients. Gleason shows how medicine is influenced, compromised, and enlivened by the cultural narratives, historical contexts, and complicated people who practice it.

In her foreword, Meghan O'Rourke, judge of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, writes that "illness is often framed as a crisis to endure or overcome on the way back to a restored 'intact' self. But as Gleason's work reminds us, illness is also a way of knowing. His essays speak to the precarious beauty of that knowing, and to the ways it connects us--to history, to culture, to one another."

Author: Jonathan Gleason
ISBN-10: 030028294X
ISBN-13: 9780300282948
Publisher: Yale University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/27/2026
Pages: 256
Format: Hardcover