On one hand, the development of medicine allows to prolong the life of patients who previously had no chance for survive, on the other hand, though, it condemns some of them and their loved ones to extreme suffering. Fear of suffering is the main reason for a possible wish for euthanasia. The research aimed at measuring the attitude towards euthanasia among doctors and nurses who come in professional contact with terminally ill patients or patients versus the medical personnel who do not come in such contact. The research included: age, profession and workplace as well as personal experience in providing care to the seriously ill. The Attitudes Towards Euthanasia Questionnaire by Głębocka and Gawor was used during the research. The method consists of three scales: Informational Support, Liberal Approach and Conservative Approach. Medical stuff taking care of terminally ill patients were less conservative in their opinions than the participants from the comparative group. The intergroup differences in terms of Liberal Approach towards Euthanasia Scale were not obtained. It turned out that the age fostered the conservative approach, and working at the intensive care units or taking care of an ill relative fostered the reduction of such approach. All the respondents approve the idea of providing the patients and their families with informational support. Working in intensive care units or taking care of terminally ill relatives seems to reduce conservative attitudes towards euthanasia because persons with such experience have personally faced the multifaceted emotional and physical costs of suffering.

In the management of human resources, the absences are monitored with Bradford Factor (BF) using the number and length of sick leaves. The sick leaves are also measured in health technology to assess the impact of health technologies on product loss, aka indirect cost (IC). Linking the BF and IC might promote BF as an outcome measure and facilitate the estimation of IC. We simulate a single company operation in several scenarios describing the firm's functioning and adjustments to workers' absence. We measure the BF and the IC due to absence and relate them with econometric modelling. Results show that BF and IC are associated in a non-linear way; hence, IC cannot be calculated from BF in a simple manner. The association is strongest for possibility to adjust to worker's absence, and a high elasticity of substitution between workers. Therefore, the possibility to proxy IC by BF is rather limited.

The defi nition of disease differs in various cultural and historical environments and is a part of the “vision of the world and of man”. In the modern era, one can speak about the successive changes in the ideals of science, including the medical sciences, designing subsequent modifi cations of the understanding of disease. Different possible approaches, cultural, anthropological, and medical, use distinct language and metaphors to present the concept of illness.

Anna Janko’s latest novel Finalistka [ The Finalist] (2021) contains a catalogue of ill-nesses that the main character, the poet Hanka M., has to struggle with. The book, which in many ways resembles a patient’s diary, is a record of the battles Hanka, the author’s alter ego, has to fight with the enemy which happens to be her own body. The article considers the strategies she employs to hold her body in check as it repeatedly lets her down and, in effect, becomes her enemy. Its disconcerting strangeness strikes her every time she slips into a search for the signs and symptoms of ageing (her reflections at this point are compared with those of Simone de Beauvoir and some other writers). In Finalistka suffering from illnesses is inscribed into life’s transience which is not just human but universal, and at the same time particular, affecting both men and women. Nonetheless, it is the woman’s perspective that this article finds more interesting.

This article explores the themes and imagery of ill health in Małgorzata Lebda’s poetry. In the poetic triptych Sprawy ziemi [ Matters of the Earth] (2020) she keeps return-ing to the experience of illness and grieves for the loss of both parents (first her mother, then her father) and a missing sister, whose memory was blotted out from family history. In fact, though, Granica lasu [ The Forest Border] (2013) and Matecznik [ Wildwood] (2016) can be seen as earlier attempts to come to terms with all those traumas by transforming them into the texture of her poems. Similarly, the mysterious elder sister who has haunted the poets’ dreams is conjured up in the Sny uckermärkerów [ The Uckermärkers’ Dreams] (2019). The final part of the triptych makes is clear that both sisters bear an in-delible mark of illness, which, in one way or another, is omnipresent in Lebda’s poetic world. It is a tough world where illness and death spares no man, animal or plant.

This article presents a theoretical framework and a network of concepts that could be useful in analyzing illness narratives. As a relatively new field of the humanities, the cultural discourse of health and illness is still in need of an appropriate methodology and a set of handy concepts, i.e. a foundational cultural theory fit to deal with texts con-cerned with the specific experience of health and illness. Here the key concepts are fragility, reparability, vulnerability and harm. While drawing on the idea of ‘writing in a state of emergency’, based on Giorgio Agamben’s discussion in The State of Exception, the article also offers the author’s own conceptions of a ‘fragile alliance’ and of reading illness narratives as a therapeutic (restorative) activity.

This article attempts to create a multivariant story about a community of women in the Polish-Jewish contact zone based on the text of Rakhel Feygenberg’s Di kinder-yorn [Polish title: A Girl’s Years: Childhood in a Polesie Shtetl], an autobiography of a Jewish young woman who grew up in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th century. Using personal insights and documentary evidence she portrays a community of women read-ers who are engaged in never-ending rounds of watching and sounding each other.

This article presents a model of reinterpretation of illness narratives from the cate-gory of autopathography to that of autosalutography, i.e. restorative/therapeutic auto-biography. The cases in point are Małgorzata Baranowska’s To jest wasze życie. Być sobą w chorobie przewlekłej [ This Is Your Life: How to Cope with a Chronic Illness] (1994) with their textual strategies of (re)negotiation of autonomy and agency. Drawing on the work of Elselijn Kingma, this analysis takes the constructivist approach to the opposition of health and illness. At the same time, the legacy notion of health with its punitive and oppressive implications, is substituted by the concept of wellbeing (as construed in Tanja Reiffenrath’s Memoirs of Wellbeing). The latter covers a broad range of lived experiences and upgrades the patient’s personal perspective, especially if it is applied within the socio-constructivist understanding of health and illness (disorder).

This is an analysis of some selected poems by Halina Poświatowska using the ap-proach and conceptual tools of somapoetics. The discussion focuses in turn on the manifestations of the (sick) body in Poświatowska’s poems and poetic prose (especially when its connected with special sound effects), the verbalization of sensory experience (primarily with regard to the sense of touch) and the role of the sick woman’s body in her poetic world (including direct references to the sick body in the act of writing). The critical strategy employed in this article is intended to complement the legacy readings of Poświatowska’s work with a functional, somapoetic interpretation that would give full scope to her narrative of the ailing body.

This article deals with chronic fatigue, one of the characteristic features of contem-porary illness narratives written by women authors. First, it focuses on Małgorzata Ba-ranowska’s To jest wasze życie. Być sobą w chorobie przewlekłej [ This Is Your Life: How to Cope with a Chronic Illness], a story of her own life impaired by SLE (systemic lupus erythe-matosus). The descriptions of her experiences (the disruption of her daily life caused by chronic pain and her attempts make sense of it) provides a frame for the reading of other narratives, Anne Boyer’s The Undying and two journalistic texts on endometriosis, one by Dr Katarzyna Szopa and the other by Dr Karolina Wigura. The article defines chronic fatigue as a social condition which combines a resistance to regenerative therapies with the stress of having to act in demanding situations of real life. The precarious condition of exhausted bodies hovering between a life fully lived and a debilitating morbidity is compared with Byung-Chul Han’s philosophy developed in The Burnout Society and The Palliative Society: Pain Today (originally published in German in 2010 and 2020 respec-tively).