"According to Frank, the modern experience of illness is substantively different from the postmodern experience of illness. Frank identifies Talcott Parsons as the preeminent theorist of the modern experience of illness, an experience characterized by the patient's assumption of what Parsons identified as the 'sick role,' which required an absolute surrender to the care of a physician and the institutional structures of medicine. Partly because of the shift in the twentieth century from acute to chronic illnesses (thanks, of course, in no small part to the successes of modern medicine), the experience of illness has shifted as well. Formerly patients generally either got better or died; now, however, patients are often neither fully cured of nor dead from their illnesses, but, rather are in and out of remission. The body remains haunted by illness and its threat; the person is neither fully healthy nor precisely ill; they are somewhere in between. Frank maintains that in postmodern times there are many people, including himself, who occupy this liminal position between health and illness: thus, in the late-twentieth-century West, we live in what Frank calls a 'remission society.' In a 'remission society' the boundaries between health and illness are permanently disrupted, thereby challenging the dichotomous formulation of health as the norm and illness as that which deviates from the norm."
- Lisa Diedrich, Treatments: Language, politics, and the culture of illness. p 3
