This chapter is a discussion and reflection of how beauty is perceived through the lens of four different athletes over four different decades. Two basketball players, a gymnast and a skater, reflect on the language of their sport and how beauty is perceived and manipulated through language and coaching techniques. The experiences affect athletes over a lifetime, both positively and negatively.
Aging is an enormously complicated process. Despite a great many of theories (among them “Program Theories”, “Combined Theories”, “Damage Theories”, “Inflamm-Aging”, “Garb-Aging” and the “Rising Deleteriome”), so far there is none which is able to explain this phenomenon satisfactorily and completely. A different approach to address the complexity of aging is to characte…
This chapter investigates the visual aspects of physical beauty of the saintly images depicted within the painterly ensembles of Byzantine art in the period between sixth and fifteenth centuries. It also examines the processes of transposition of beauty as a religious and ideological notion into the visual sphere of its iconographic and aesthetic significance. During the millennium of developme…
Ageing is a natural process. Everyone must undergo this phase of life at his or her own time and pace. In the broader sense, ageing reflects all the changes taking place over the course of life. These changes start from birth—one grows, develops and attains maturity. To the young, ageing is exciting. Middle age is the time when people notice the age-related changes like greying of hair, wrink…
The Dutch National Care for the Elderly Programme was an initiative organized by the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) between 2008 and 2016. The aim of the programme was to collect knowledge about frail elderly, to assess their needs and to provide person-centred and integrated care better suited to their needs. The budget of EUR 88 million was provided by th…
In many religious circles and philosophies of life, the human body is excluded from the realm of spirituality and meaning. Due to a dualistic approach, nudity is viewed as merely a physical and corporeal category. In social media, there is the real danger that the naked human body is exploited for commercial gain. Advertisements often leave the impression that the body, very specifically the ge…
Medications are used as the primary approach to prevent and effectively manage the chronic conditions. Non-adherence to medication is recognized as a worldwide public health problem with important implications for the management of chronic diseases, which affects every level of the population, particularly older adults due to the high number of coexisting diseases and consequent polypharmacy. E…
Medical Bondage explores how, in the nineteenth century, experimental surgeries on enslaved and laboring women enabled the rise of American gynecology as a medical specialty, and shaped our understanding of race. Merging women’s, medical, and social history, the book makes Black and Irish women's lives—not just their bodies—part of an origins story of American medicine (one that has large…
This book takes you on a journey of discovery where you are invited to challenge ideas, both new and old, in relation to mental health. It is made up of a series of three extracts. The first extract, ‘Boundaries of explanation’, sets out the theme of boundaries: boundaries within and between groups; within and between explanatory frameworks; and within and between experiences of mental heal…
Clinical Encounters in Sexuality makes an intervention into the fields of clinical psychoanalysis and sexuality studies, in an effort to think about a range of issues relating to sexuality from a clinical psychoanalytic perspective. This book concentrates on a number of concepts, namely identity, desire, pleasure, perversion, ethics and discourse. The editors, Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson, hav…