SILVA, T: Radiation Narratives and Illness:

Over the years, studies in the field of Medical Anthropology have showed that the chronic illness, as radiation illness, enters into an individual¿s life in such a way that it becomes inseparable from the person¿s life history. Drawing upon extensive field research, the book explores the issue of radiaiton illness narratives related to the 1987 Goiânia disaster. The work is an ethnographic account of the social suffering as produced from the interplay of disaster, health, memory, and the narrativization process. The main premise of the book is that the disaster continues to affect those individuals whose suffering is denied by the institutional power. This work, as a case study, could quite easily be used in several different courses within cultural anthropology, general social sciences, and latin American studies department. The analysis as well should help shed some lights in the consequences of the use of nuclear technology in medicine without appropriated surveillance.