Wife's Illness Research Articles

Cinema and Neurocognitive Disorders

Cinema is a visual art which vividly depicts human life. Since human life is supported by memory, a number of movies tackle memory disorders including total life amnesia. In addition, dementia or neurocognitive disorder is one of the popular subjects in cinema. Two movies are introduced in this review. The first one, My Wife's Illness, depicts the story of a pediatrician's housewife who suffers dementia with Lewy bodies. She complains of significant visual hallucinations and delusions, which torments her husband. The second one, Still Alice, portrays a university professor of linguistics. Interestingly, her first symptom is word-finding difficulty. She shows rapid progression of Alzheimer's disease. During the course of her cognitive impairment, she develops symptoms including mirror sign and suicidal ideation. The problem of truth-telling for Alzheimer's disease is also discussed in this film.

Movie Review: Paywall: The Business of Scholarship

Movie Review: Paywall: The Business of Scholarship

Demented Love

Demented Love

In Sickness and in Health? Physical Illness as a Risk Factor for Marital Dissolution in Later Life.

The health consequences of marital dissolution are well known, but little work has examined the impact of health on the risk of marital dissolution. We use a sample of 2,701 marriages from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the role of serious physical illness onset in subsequent marital dissolution via either divorce or widowhood. We use a series of discrete time event history models with competing risks to estimate the impact of husband's and wife's physical illness onset on risk of divorce and widowhood. We find that only measures of wife's illness onset are associated with elevated risk of divorce, while measures of either spouse's illness onset is associated with elevated risk of widowhood. Further, in the case of heart problems, we find that this gender difference is statistically significant. These findings suggest health as a determinant of marital dissolution in later life via both biological and gendered social pathways.

In sickness and in health? Physical illness as a risk factor for marital dissolution in later life.

The health consequences of marital dissolution are well known, but little work has examined the impact of health on the risk of marital dissolution. In this study we use a sample of 2,701 marriages from the Health and Retirement Study (1992-2010) to examine the role of serious physical illness onset (i.e., cancer, heart problems, lung disease, and/or stroke) in subsequent marital dissolution due to either divorce or widowhood. We use a series of discrete-time event history models with competing risks to estimate the impact of husband's and wife's physical illness onset on risk of divorce and widowhood. We find that only wife's illness onset is associated with elevated risk of divorce, while either husband's or wife's illness onset is associated with elevated risk of widowhood. These findings suggest the importance of health as a determinant of marital dissolution in later life via both biological and gendered social pathways.

Up Close and Personal with Cancer The Cancer Chronicles Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery by George Johnson Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2013. 299 pp. $27.95, C$32. ISBN 9780307595140. Bodley Head, London. £18.99. ISBN 9781847921666.

Johnson weaves together a memoir of his wife's illness and his personal investigation into what is and is not known about cancer.

Disclosure of Incurable Illness to Spouses: Do They Want to Know? A Swedish Population-Based Follow-Up Study

Awareness of the cancer patient's terminal state decreases the risk of psychological morbidity of the bereaved. We wanted to determine whether male spouses of cancer patients who died from their disease had received information that the illness was incurable and to determine their preferences of disclosure. The study included 907 widowers whose wives had died of cancer. In an anonymous questionnaire, we asked whether the widower had received information that his wife's illness was incurable and about his attitudes towards receiving this information. Six hundred ninety-one widowers (76%) participated. Eighty percent of the widowers reported that they were told [corrected] that the wife's cancer was incurable, and 21% reported that they had been informed within 1 week before the patient's death. Although 14% of the widowers did not think the next of kin should be told immediately when the patient's cancer is beyond cure, 39% of the men did not want the patient to be immediately informed. Furthermore, 71% of the men who were never informed about the incurable illness believed that the next of kin should receive that information immediately. Although a large majority of men prefer an immediate disclosure about the incurable stage of their wife's illness, 41% of the husbands received this information during the last week of the patient's life or not at all. These findings indicate that there is room for improvement in the level of communication between health providers and the husbands of women with incurable cancer.

Conventions of Madness:Bürgerlichkeitand the Asylum in theVormärz

Soonafter his wife's incarceration in the Eberbach asylum in 1827, Herr S., a rector and soon to becomeGymnasiumprofessor in Weilburg, wrote to Philipp H. Lindpaintner, the asylum's director. The letter was about the pressing problem of his wife's illness, but, strangely, Herr S. spent a great deal of time chatting about himself — about his new position as professor; his recent salary raise; his new apartment “near the castle garden, where the Hofmarschal used to live”; his library; hisNaturalien-Kabinett(natural history collection), which will be put on display at theRathaus“for the use of schools and the enjoyment of the friends of nature and art.” Finally, Herr S. turned to the issue at hand: his wife's mental illness.

Will I be to my son as my father was to me? Narrative of a father with a premature baby

Abstract This paper is the narrative of a first-time father with a son born seven weeks early by Caesarean section. Against the anxiety and trauma of his infant's birth and his wife's illness, another inner darker drama is being relived. Michael shows all the wounds of a battered child. He asks two awesome questions - Will I be to my son as my father was to me? Will my son be to me as I was to my father? Fearful and at first unvoiced questions, the developing interviews gave them a voice. We respected Michael's sharing of the early and fearful days and nights when his infant first came home. We sometimes found it hard to empathize with his running away to hide in work, until we understood what he was hiding from. Most poignant was his struggle with his anger and hurt with his father and his desire to understand, ‘Why?’, so that he would not be like this to his son. We saw a sensitive revelation of life being born inside him anew, as he made contact with his real infant and his psychic infant within. Of pa...

Marital Adaptation and Interaction of Couples After a Mastectomy

This study explored the marital adjustment and interactional patterns of married couples two to three years after the wife had undergone a single mastectomy for Stage I or I1 breast cancer. The subjects consisted of 14 couples who completed inventories measuring individual and marital adjustment. Videotapes of standardized interviews were rated for patterns of interaction. Neither husbands nor wives were found to be psychologically symptomatic, and both had adapted well to the wife's illness. Measures of marital adaptation, however, showed significant differences from norms on cohesion and consensus, with marked patterns of enmeshment and fluidity of adaptation. Such findings generally indicate serious marital pathology. Measures of individual adjustment and the clinical presentation of spouses did not support that conclusion, however. Instead, the authors suggest that the findings regarding marital adjustment indicate a normal reaction to life-threatening events rather than a pathological process. Furthermore, the standardization of psychological instruments on psychiatric populations may make the instruments dual measures when used with physically ill populations.

Couples coping with chronic illness: Women with rheumatoid arthritis and their healthy husbands

Effects of a chronic disease, rheumatoid arthritis, upon the psychological adjustment of 103 women and their healthy husbands were examined. Husbands completed scales assessing perceived vulnerability to illness and coping efficacy, burden of caring for their wives, and level of psychological adjustment. Wives completed the Ways of Coping scale, rated attributions about arthritis, and rated criticalness and supportiveness of their husbands. Husbands were also interviewed and their responses coded for critical remarks about the wife. The same variables were used to predict each partner's adjustment in order to compare factors associated with each. Hierarchical regression indicated that negative marital interaction surrounding the wife's illness was a determinant of both partners' psychological adjustment. Apart from this variable, different factors predicted husbands' and wives' mental health. Husbands were most affected by their own perceived vulnerability to disease and coping inefficacy. Wives were most affected by pain severity and how they coped with arthritis.

Methodist Missionaries in Yokohama

R. S. Maclay of the American Methodist Episcopal Mission came to Yokohama on July 11, 1873, after working as a missionary in China for 25 years. On July 30, the same year, I. H. Correll stopped at Yokohama because of his wife's illness while on the way to evangelize China as a missionary. On August 8, J. C. Davison and Julius Soper came to Yokohama as missionaries. The four missionaries organized the Methodist Episcopal Mission of Japan on August 8, 1873.Maclay and Correll served as the missionaries in charge of Yokohama. They founded churches and a theological school there. That school moved to Tokyo later to unite with Tokyo Eiwa School and became Aoyama Gakuin.G. F. Draper came to Yokohama in 1879. He became the principal of a school for the blind, which his mother had founded earlier.Mrs. C. W. Van Petten worked as the principal of a women's theological school on the Bluff, Yokohama. She opened two primary schools with Waka Ninomiya, a woman who was a member of the Yokohama Methodist Church.In 1889, some members of the Yokohama Methodist Church founded an English night school where several foreign missionaries worked as teachers.Methodist missionaries in Yokohama made many contributions in evangelical and educational activities there.

A comparison of the outcome of treatment in female and male alcoholics.

The literature on female alcoholism is relatively scanty. The few reports that have been published suggest that the female alcoholic is different from the male alcoholic: for example, Lysansky (1957) stated that American female alcoholics start to drink later, lose control later, drink alone, prefer wine and have fewer arrests or admissions. Perhaps her illness is also more severe: Fort and Porterfield (1961) discovered in their sample that the women required a much shorter length of time to become alcoholic than did the men; the phases of the process were less distinct and nearly all the women had serious personality difficulties or had experienced strong emotional stress. Another American author, Rosenbaum (1958), thought that female alcoholism was an expression of personality misdevelopment, and produced some evidence to support this view. However, he also demonstrated that in married female alcoholics the husband's own heavy drinking, as well as his non-constructive attitude towards his wife's drinking, contributed to the wife's illness.

Encephalitis

UR patient was a white, married woman of forty-nine; born in Maryland of an English mother (now living) and a French father (who died of cerebral hemorrhage). Her economic condition was comfortable and in an urban environment. Her religion, originally Catholic, had been changed to Protestant. The husband was so upset by his wife's illness that he was unable to give any early history of her family life. Her sister, though upset, gave a fairly clear picture of the patient's life preceding her admission to the hospital. Mrs. A had had a normal childhood. She was described as being an extremely kind-hearted and level-headed person, who always took the initiative in things. She had had childhood diseases; and she had had pneumonia at thirty-nine. Menstruation had been normal and menopause had occurred uneventfully. After graduation from high school she had worked as a milliner, a buyer, and a school teacher. She had broken an engagement during her early thirties and had married her present husband when she was forty-three. Their life has been very happy. Six weeks before admission, Mrs. A felt as though she had influenza. She had a chill, followed by several days of feeling comfortable, and then another chill. The family doctor thought she might have influenza or malaria. Chills continued and her condition grew worse. Her temperature elev ted to 104 degrees F. and with it she became irrational. She was unable to void, developed pyuria, and the bladder became markedly distended. Likewise she was unable to defecate (the doctor likened it to paralytic ileus) and there was much borborygmus. For five days she was stuporous. A consultant did two blood counts and a lumbar puncture (spinal fluid cell count was 208 lymphocytes) and made a diagnosis of encephalitis. The lumbar puncture seemed to relieve Mrs. A temporarily; she improved physically though mentally she seemed sicker. A special nurse