ABSTRACT
Although the specific details of the person’s problems of living are unique, most human responses to illness and health have common denominators. People often believe that they are all alone in their experience of distress. However, is this rarely the case. Sullivan (Evans 1996:18) said: ‘We are all more simply human than otherwise.’ In Scotland we say that ‘we are a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns’. Crudely translated this means that ‘we are all children of the same good god under heaven’. We are all from the same family of man and so we have the capacity to understand our fellow women and men. Whether we use that capacity is, of course, another matter.
