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A review by madisnowg
Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Gavin Francis
3.0
after my long and gorgeous medical history i do think there’s a ceiling to how well i can take health advice from a white man with a medical degree named gavin, so the 3 star rating is not personal. i think this is a good synthesis on different idea about convalescence, and might be helpful to someone figuring out how to heal. i really enjoyed his exploration of healing as akin to gardening — a careful cultivation of balance and wellness, tending to the body like a plant.
at points, this reminded me of a professor who kept regaling me one semester with stories of two different chronically ill people she knew; one she described as “choosing to not let her sickness define her,” and the other as “succumbing to her illness and giving up on her life.” what that professor was actually describing was two different people experiencing objectively different levels of illness, but non disabled people love to construct theories of morality around sickness to feel safe in the knowledge they could “overcome” whatever might happen to them if they were to become sick. that isn’t the approach the author takes here, but he doesn’t explicitly renounce that reading of his work regarding the role that elements like placebo and mindset play in the experience of illness, which gives me the heebie jeebies a little bit.
at points, this reminded me of a professor who kept regaling me one semester with stories of two different chronically ill people she knew; one she described as “choosing to not let her sickness define her,” and the other as “succumbing to her illness and giving up on her life.” what that professor was actually describing was two different people experiencing objectively different levels of illness, but non disabled people love to construct theories of morality around sickness to feel safe in the knowledge they could “overcome” whatever might happen to them if they were to become sick. that isn’t the approach the author takes here, but he doesn’t explicitly renounce that reading of his work regarding the role that elements like placebo and mindset play in the experience of illness, which gives me the heebie jeebies a little bit.