Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography

Abstract

The author has found that pathographies—"book-length personal accounts of illnesss," her term—are mainly a post-1950 phenomenon, perhaps because illness has become divorced from everyday life while medicine has come to focus on illness in isolation from the person. The genre has ranged from "testimonial pathographies [to] angry pathographies [to] pathographies advocating alternative modes of treatment." The author analytically compares pathography to myth, dealing in detail with "The Myth of Rebirth and the Promise of Cure," "Myths of Battle and Journey," "Myths About Dying," and "Healthy-Mindedness: Myth as Medicine." She notes that "pathography seems to be a middle-class or upper-middle-class genre" and hopes that "case study and reportage" will redress the balance and give voice to the indigent ill. The author, who is associate professor of humanities at the Pennsylvania State University School of Medicine and teaches literature to medical students, also proposes that "another voice we need to hear is

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