Emily Lim Rogers examines chronic illness labor in new book
Duke anthropologist's 'Sick Work' explores ME/CFS diagnosis, treatment access, and the historical downplaying of fatigue.
What to know
- ME/CFS is not rare—estimated to affect half of the millions with long Covid—but remains widely misunderstood, with pushing through symptoms leading to crashes rather than improvement.
- Rogers' book traces fatigue from a 19th-century 'solvable problem' to accepted mundanity, paralleling how work exhaustion became normalized in U.S. culture.
- Living with ME/CFS creates a paradox: the condition prevents work while economic survival demands it, a tension Rogers calls the 'recursive loop' of invisible illness labor.
Emily Lim Rogers Duke University cultural anthropologist, authorCenters for Disease Control and Prevention Public health agency
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage posts
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“The work and everyday labor of living with ME/CFS contains this recursive loop of everyday labor of being ill, where you can't work, but you need to work.”
— Emily Lim Rogers -
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A new book examines the labor of getting chronic illness diagnosed and treated—for those lucky enough to get care.
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Emily Lim Rogers receives ME/CFS diagnosis — The author of the new book received her own ME/CFS diagnosis in 2024, informing her perspective on the condition and its impact on labor and daily life.
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ME/CFS cluster first documented in Lake Tahoe region — Dozens of people in the Lake Tahoe, California region presented to doctors with debilitating fatigue and related symptoms, marking the first clearly documented cluster of what would later be labeled chronic fatigue syndrome by the CDC.
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Stress gains recognition as legitimate scientific phenomenon — Stress only became widely accepted as a legitimate scientific phenomenon in the 1970s, a development that shaped how fatigue and exhaustion came to be understood.
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Concept of fatigue enters medical discourse in late 19th century — Fatigue was initially conceived of as a problem that could be solved, particularly through the lens of understanding the body as a machine. It did not enter English-language medical journals until the last decade of the 1800s, and gradually became accepted as mundane and expected rather than treated as a solvable problem.