Spanning Cancer: Cancer as an Episode in an Individual Life Story

In her path-finding study, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993), Anne Hunsaker Hawkins uses the Freudian term ‘pathography’ for illness narratives by patients and carers. G. Thomas Couser, in another fine book, Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability and Life Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), suggests using the term ‘autopathography’ to differentiate first-person illness narratives from third-person ones. In one of the foundational books in the field, Arthur Kleinman uses the less forbidding term ‘patient narrative’. See Arthur Kleinman, The Patient Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988). I prefer the similarly non-technical term illness life writing because a term like ‘pathography’ is too reminiscent of the cool scientistic ethos that patient and carer writers often critique. Indeed illness life writing is often motivated by the desire to critique that very ethos.

Dr Levine suggested this term during question time after the lecture.

Simon J. Williams, “Chronic illness as Biographical Disruption or Biographical Disruption as Chronic Illness? Reflections on a Core Concept”, Sociology of Health and Illness, No. 1, 2000, pp. 40–67.

Frank, The Wounded Storyteller. See especially chapters Four, Five, Six and Seven. See also Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness, and Couser, Recovering Bodies.

James Pennebaker, Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering from Trauma & Emotional Upheaval (New Harbinger, Oakland, CA), 2004. See also Stephen J. Lapore and Joshua M. Smyth (eds), The Writing Cure: How Expressive Writing Promotes Health and Well-Being (Washington DC: American Psychological Association), 2002.