L I V E S


The patient perspective


Focusing on the great men (and few women, at least in terms of the Reading Room frieze) of medicine tells only half the story. Medical encounters include the patient as well as the physician, and self-help or community care has as important a role to play in the history of the field as ‘professional’ medicine.


Pathography on the rise


Professor Anne Hunsaker Hawkins defines pathog- raphy as ‘a form of autobiography or biography that describes personal experiences of illness, treatment and sometimes death’. As a literary genre, pathography only really emerged in the late twentieth century. In her book Reconstructing Illness, Hawkins attributes this to the modern separation of illness and everyday life, and a contemporary medical focus on disease rather than the patient experience. Pathography, Hawkins says, ‘returns the voice of the patient to the world of medicine’ and can be seen as the counter- part to the story presented by the physician’s case.


…I awoke with a chilly fi t. A violent fever with acute pains in diff erent parts of my body followed it… I saw my danger painted in [my


pupil’s] countenance. He bled me plentifully and gave me a dose


of the mercurial medicine… The remaining part of the night was passed under an apprehension


that my labours were near an end. Dr Benjamin Rush describing his own


experience of contracting ‘bilious remitting yellow fever’ in Philadelphia, 1793


‘The patients with their fears waiting to see the doctor’ Oil on wood Rosemary Carson, 1997 546554i Wellcome Library


The whole world is watching us. Publicity, yes, the newspapers are


doing it because they need a story, television is doing it because they need a story, but what about us? We’re not stories, we’re human beings. Our story needs to be told


in our own words, not in the words of the media. If you want to know the truth about Thalidomide, listen to us.


Sukeshi Thakkar, interviewed in 2013 for Thalidomide: An oral history


— 178 —


Read


Brody H. Stories of Sickness. New York: Oxford University Press; 2002.


Hawkins AH. Reconstructing Illness: Studies in pathography. Indiana: Purdue University Press; 1998.


Marsh H. Do No Harm: Stories of life, death and brain surgery. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 2014.


Sacks O. The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. London: Picador; 2011.


Watt B. Patient: The true story of a rare illness. London: Viking; 1996.


…the best teaching


is that taught by the patient. Sir William Osler in On the Need


of a Radical Reform in Our Methods of Teaching Medical Students, 1904


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