Samantha Solimeo: With Shaking Hands: Aging with Parkinson’s Disease in America’s Heartland

Abstract

Samantha Solimeo has written a book that enables us to understand the experience of aging with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) in rural America. It is an important addition to the literature on aging with a chronic condition both because of its focus and unique methods. As a medical anthropologist, her approach included extensive participant observation with older adults living with PD and their caregivers, and their stories are an integral component of this description of the experience. She focuses on the difficulty of disentangling aging from the condition of PD in the words of people who are living it. PD is presented as a case study of a condition whose early symptoms mirror symptoms of ‘‘normal aging’’—which provides the unique opportunity of studying the experience of both aging and living with a chronic ailment within the cultural model of aging as a series of losses and decline. The study is framed in terms of the combined approaches of Explanatory Models, illness narratives, and participant observation. She utilizes illness narratives to provide a diachronic, lifecourse perspective of the experience of living and aging with PD based on extensive qualitative research with PD sufferers and their caregivers in rural Iowa. She uses these various levels of analysis to provide an understanding of the embodiment of the body aging with PD within this cultural context. The rural environment is discussed briefly in this complex, multi-faceted study. This is, in fact, a multi-method study based not only on qualitative techniques but also quantitative analysis of questionnaire data. Solimeo provides a rich description of the research process and evolving methodology, including a detailed description of her data management and analysis process. She describes her development of an integrated data base of the findings from the approximately 300 people enrolled in the study. Her extensive research included participant-observation with 13 support