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Using excerpts from videotaped consultations of physicians meeting with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) patients in a UK hospital, this article pays attention to biographic or narrative time over the course of three consultations. On the basis of this approach an important role emerges for what we term proto-stories that doctors may tell to their patients. This shift from patients'' to doctors'' stories is linked to visual evidence regarding the embodiment of doctor and patient. Taken together, these topics indicate differences in the way that space and time are constructed in the consultation, and with that the possibilities that arise for action and understanding. By examining what patients say about their treatment in interviews before and after the consultation, we develop a conceptual analysis in which the dominant medico-scientific regime (the ‘voice of medicine’ [Mishler, E. G. (1984). The discourse of medicine: Dialectics of medical interviews. Norwood, NJ: Ablex]) is compared to what we call the medico-presentational way of signifying. This enables proposals to be made about how these two regimes of representation operate together to facilitate treatment or, where they are separated, how this can lead to what patients see as an unsatisfactory outcome. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article reports a qualitative study of how homeless people visualize their life in hostels and on the streets of London. Using a photo-production technique, the research enabled participants to show their situation as well as to tell about their experiences. Participants were given cameras and asked to take photographs typical of their day as homeless people, this material being the subject of a subsequent interview. This provided both visual and text data that were analysed together so as to establish different engagements of the participants with the city and with domiciled people. Presenting the material from six of the participants, these different engagements are described with reference to issues of estrangement, exclusion and visualization employed as explanatory concepts. The article identifies and compares the different ways in which homeless people attempt not only to survive but also to [make their home] in the city. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the results of a survey of general practitioners in Leicestershire, England about their preferences for counseling provision in primary care. Comparison between urban and rural practices' employment of an in-house counselor; Comparison of referral rates; Perceived benefits of employing a counselor.

The authors attempted to discover the part the physical setting of the ward plays in patients' recovery by asking patients to take photographs of their ward, its spaces and objects, and then interviewing them about these images in hospital and subsequently in their homes. Photography allowed the patients to identify and capture aspects of the setting that they found salient and provided the photo-elicitation material for the interviews. Based on these data, the authors present (a) a critical discussion of the use of photography as method and its implications for qualitative analysis, (b) an overview of the kinds of image taken with respect to the ward and the course of patients' recovery, and (c) a theoretical analysis, employing Walter Benjamin's use of the concept of mimesis, that understands recovery as a bodily act in response to the shock to the senses that hospitalization and surgery produce.