This article reviews four pieces of research which focus on conversation and illness. Each is published in a special theme issue of the journal, Communication & Medicine. The review is organized to demonstrate several general points: That communication practice is finely and systematically structured; that structures in communication serve to identify people as members of some social categories rather than others; that movement among these categories is immanent in shifts of communication practices and structures; that relations among people are negotiated through such structuring and shifting of communication resources; and that these patterns of practice are active in socially occasioned, and culturally distinctive ways, from clinical scenes of interaction to the scenes of routine everyday life
