From mother to daughter. Chronic disease in the inheritance: body injuries and narrative practices

Abstract

The article reflects, in the perspective of medical anthropology and with reference to a specific female life-story collected on the field, an healthcare setting, on the lived experience of chronic disease such as body injury and on the transformative potential of narrative process about disease. It is the story of a thirty-eight years old woman, diabetic from childhood, on the experience of the diagnosis of diabetes even in her teenage daughter, told during hospital stay. From this story it is clear that the organic disease involves a person in the reorganization of the image of itself, the world and the relations and it shows how the narrative process can foster a creative elaboration of experience.