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After falling into mental illness as a young man, the British artist Richard Dadd (1817–86) spent some 20 years as a patient at Bethlem Hospital in London. A rare example of his writings from these years survives in the form of marginalia in a copy of Lectures on Painting and Design by Benjamin Robert Haydon, held in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. This article presents a transcription of the notes, along with an introduction setting them in the contexts of Dadd's career and his relationship with the senior staff at Bethlem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study of breast cancer screening and treatment decisions suggests that risk understandings are influenced by the dominant illness narrative of restitution within Anglo-Western cultures. Restitution stories reflect the cultural values of personal responsibility and control in combating disease and returning to a life of normalcy. In the context of breast cancer, individuals seek restitution by following the dictums of biomedicine, which promotes early detection as prevention, aggressive treatment as cure, and reconstructive surgery as concealment. Our findings suggest that these risk understandings contribute to the consumption of health-care interventions that exceeds medical guidelines in this country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intensive care unit (ICU) diaries are increasingly being used in UK hospitals as a therapeutic means to address the psychological effects of an ICU stay on patients. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommends that services are developed to meet the psychological needs of patients following critical illness. This article discusses ICU diaries as a service to meet these needs. There is a greater demand for evidence-based research to support the positive effects of the diaries. Equally, there is a need to highlight the negative impact they may have on patients who would not wish to have a diary because of the traumatic experience of critical illness. To gain an insight into the use of patient diaries, an audit was conducted at one ICU, which found compliance with completing them was poor. This article gives an overview of the available literature. Recommendations are made to improve the use of ICU diaries for clinical practice in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the growing field of illness narratives, autobiographical accounts of patients who live with chronic pain form a comparatively rare subgenre. These narratives face manifold difficulties in conveying of what it means to live with nearly constant, lifecrippling pain, struggling against the reader's urge to turn away from the monotonous torture, and also against the invisibility of pain, which causes the marginalisation of sufferers with chronic pain disease in society. Intrinsically bound up with this marginalisation is the issue of available language that allows a sufferer to verbalise her pain. Through exemplary readings of two contemporary illness narratives of chronic pain patients (Lous Heshusius, Lynne Greenberg) and one of the late 19th century (Alphonse Daudet), this essay questions the supposedly self-evident, exceptional status which has been attributed to physical pain by most phenomenological thinkers: a feeling that is utterly isolating, inexpressible and simply resistant to translation. Instead, this essay argues, illness narratives inscribe individual experience into a larger community, which is constantly transformed by testimonies. This circular structure of "narrative ethics" (A. Frank) thus challenges the tenet of pain's inexpressibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores and critically contextualises the photographic production of heliotherapist Auguste Rollier (1874-1954), specifically the 'patient portraits' photographed at his Leysin sanatoria over a substantial period of four decades, c.1903-1944. It argues that these photographs, ignored in secondary literature, were particularly persuasive in communicating the natural healing powers of sunlight and through their international dissemination brought Rollier's work professional acclaim and prestige. Always presenting anonymous patients, and most often children, the images produced for Rollier's work interweave aesthetic and medical interests. Whether through the aesthetics of the photograph, of the positioning and appearance of the patient's body, or of the language used to describe these, issues of beauty and harmony were significant preoccupations for Rollier and the dissemination of his heliotherapeutic practice. The article argues that these aesthetic preoccupations drove his work, that the patient's progress and final cure, and thus the therapy's efficacy, were determined by aesthetic criteria—read through the body itself and its photographic representation. This legibility, of the body and its photography, was crucial to articulating the sun's perceived natural ability to improve, heal and even 'rebuild' individual patients into socially and physically productive citizens. As such, the article contends, Rollier privileged image over word, conceiving the former as possessing an unequalled 'eloquence' to communicate the efficacy and social potential of heliotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the way in which early modern English medical patients connected illness to emotions, particularly grief, through an analysis of patient narratives, including correspondence and diaries. Focus is given to the ways in which men and women understood this relationship in different ways as well as the relationship between emotions such as grief and sorrow and negative social interactions characterized by gossip and poor finances. It is argued that women accounted for the emotional causes of illness more often than men.

Online illness stories (and, arguably, other online stories as well) do not simply adhere to or demonstrate the increasingly identifiable generic conventions of electronic media but also contain the potential to play with their form as particular stories and perspectives demand. Through an investigation of the My Cancer blog, hosted on National Public Radio's Web site from 2006 to 2009, I will examine how blogging narrative negotiates the paradoxical aspects of its hybrid but generic form of storytelling. Borrowing a phrase that Arthur W. Frank uses to describe the impact of story in The Wounded Storyteller, I argue that blogs such as My Cancer forward a dynamic and ambivalent model of storytelling that encourages their readers to think differently about illness and illness communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on "The Bryce News: Of the Patients, By the Patients, For the Patients," a weekly newsletter made by the Bryce Hospital patients and founded by Sara Mayfield. It offers a history of several issues of the newsletter particularly on the self-expression of the patients. The author states that the newsletter allows the patients to have an outlet of their feelings through making jokes, cartoons, and poetry.

People with dementia are finding increasingly creative and diverse ways of making their voice heard in society and one such method is through the publication of autobiographical accounts. Following set inclusion criteria, this metaethnographic analysis compares and contrasts the contents of 12 books written by people with dementia and published between 1989 (the year of publication of the first text) and the end of 2007 (the selected cut-off point for inclusion). Of the 12 books, three authors were published twice, five were male, eight were from the United States of America, one was Australian and all nine had a professional background. Eight of the authors had Alzheimer's disease and one had frontotemporal dementia. The average age of the narrator was 51.5 years (age range 38-61 years). Meta-ethnographic analysis of the 12 books inductively generated five themes that linked each story and these were: (a) awareness of change; (b) experiencing loss ; (c) standing up and bearing witness ; (d) sustaining continuity ; and (e) liberation and death. The importance of reconstructing identity appeared a pivotal process in living with the onset and progression of dementia together with maintaining key social relationships and networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a therapeutic creative writing project undertaken at Kings College London and University College Hospital London, funded by Arts Council England. The project sought to increase understanding of experiences of personal expressive and explorative writing by cancer patients receiving palliative care. Narrative methods were used to analyse and interpret patients' written and oral (transcripts of semistructured interviews) responses, researchers' field notes and written responses of staff. These indicated that writing: (1) facilitated patients' ability and opportunity to discover what they thought, felt, remembered; (2) enhanced their awareness of, and ability to express, issues to which focused attention needed to be paid; and (3) offered satisfaction and fulfilment of creative expression and exploration and the production of writings which to them and close others were vital. Illuminatively drawing upon patients' writings and responses, this paper is underpinned by discussion of therapeutic writing and its relationship to creative writing, with reference to a range of previous research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers insights on Scott Stossel's book "My Age of Anxiety" which belongs to the genre of pathography written by sufferers themselves. Topics discussed include the difference of first-person accounts from other popular genres that are also called pathographies, the changing styles of pathography which reflect on the dominant cultural metaphors and the expectation of therapeutic benefits as a motivation for writing the pathography.