ENGL ENGL 411 Medical Autobiography
Medicine faces the challenge of applying a universalizing diagnosis to each patient's intensively personal and unique experience. Autobiography, a traditional locus for self-reflection, provides an especially appealing genre through which to explore these tensions between medical categorization and the unique individual. When medical practitioners write autobiographies, they express varying degrees of satisfaction and discomfort with navigating between the hard sciences and the subjective experiences of their patients. When people who have experienced illness write autobiographies, ailments play a key role as authors reflect on the effects that sickness has on their sense of self. Readings of autobiographical works written from the perspective of both practitioner and patient in order to explore the relationship between illness and self-expression.