Diagnosing Folklore

Trevor J. Blank, Malone, New York, is assistant professor of communication at the State University of New York at Potsdam. He is the author of The Last Laugh: Folk Humor, Celebrity Culture, and Mass-Mediated Disasters in the Digital Age and coauthor of Maryland Legends: Folklore from the Old Line State.|Andrea Kitta, Greenville, North Carolina, is associate professor at East Carolina University. She is the author of Vaccinations and Public Concern in History: Legend, Rumor, and Risk Perception.

This timely volume represents a worthy new step in the application of folklore to the study of health, illness, and care, and to related issues of communication, self-definition, and community practice. Case narratives and methodological discussions frame this book’s particular focus on dis/ability, mental health and illness, socially stigmatized conditions, and social constructions of the ‘normal.’ It raises (but does not pretend to answer) tough questions about power, privilege, lived experience, the nature and location of ‘expertise,’ conceptual validity of the opinions and approaches of identity-group ‘outsiders,’ the nature of ‘normality’ and acceptability, and many more. It will be a valuable reference work not only within its own discipline, but among health care and health policy professionals who recognize the critical importance of trying to empathize with the experiences and perspectives of their intended beneficiaries. Let us hope their number is legion!"" - Bonnie B. O’Connor, folklorist and professor emerita of pediatrics at the Warren Alpert School of Medicine of Brown University""This is the book that profoundly shows how folklore touches lives at their core. It makes us realize how folklore opens for view, indeed defines, disability, health, and trauma in our consciousness. With provocative case studies, authors probe fundamental matters of normality and wellness in mind and body. Using folklore to guide a healthy checkup of basic notions of life, the book is a welcome dose of reality and culture to bridge science and the humanities and to invite our own self-examination."" - Simon J. Bronner, Distinguished Professor of Folklore at the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, and author of Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture and Campus Traditions: Folklore from the Old-Time College to the Modern Mega-University