In the recent past, conventional medicine has tended to ignore the patient’s own narrative. Today we are seeing a striking increase in the publication of ‘patients’ tales’ or illness narrative, known as pathography.Sufferers and carers are sharing personal accounts of ill health, trauma and survival with a readership hungry to empathise, sympathise and understand. Why are patients so keen to write and the public so keen to read? What happens when identity and illness collide? How do these ‘medical confessionals’ benefit us? What can literature reveal that science can’t explain? Our guests will discuss these questions and more as they explore the growing market for pathography in literature and its place in medical health.

Speakers
> Michael Blastland, author of ‘Joe’, about his severely autistic son
> Francesca Happé, Cognitive Psychologist, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London

Facilitator
> Neil Vickers, Lecturer, Department of English, King’s College London

This is the first in a series of four events exploring medicine and literature.

Further events:
• ‘Doctor as Scribe’, Thursday 11 October
• ‘Books to Make You Better’, Thursday 8 November
• ‘Medblogs and Power of the Net’, Thursday 13 December

Michael Blastland
I was born in Glasgow and went to school in Tring (Hertfordshire). I live in a small village in Hertfordshire, often with my daughter Cait, less often but more noisily with my son Joe. A journalist all my professional life, I started on weekly newspapers before moving to the BBC to make programmes for Radio 4, including ‘Analysis’ and ‘More or Less’.

Francesca Happé
My research is in normal and abnormal development of social understanding, its origins in the brain and its breakdown, with a special interest in Asperger’s syndrome, autism and social development.

Neil Vickers
I specialise in the history of medicine in literature; the links between medical history and the history of aesthetics; psychological case histories; and the history of psychology. I am currently working on a project investigating how far the literary theory of narrative might be applied to the clinical sphere.