Culture and the meanings of cancer

This article proposes that the nurse understand culture ideationally in terms of models of reality. A distinction is made between cultural and individual models, and between lay persons' models of sickness and practitioners' models. These are described and discussed in relation to the meanings of cancer. A role for the nurse as a cultural broker, negotiating meanings across the patient-practitioner divide, is outlined. Material taken from the case studies of two cancer patients is used to illustrate how these patients modeled their illness experience and how the nurse might use such information to better enlist patient cooperation in the management and treatment of their illness.