Life-Writing From Medicine: Biographies and Memoirs of Physicians

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Life-writing is an increasingly recognized genre including, among other forms of expression, biography, memoir, journals, diaries and letters. In addition to providing a source of information about potentially significant historical and social dimensions of medicine, the life-writing of physicians also offers the public a greater sense of the writers' inner lives and provides a resource of wisdom and companionship to other physicians and health care professionals across time and various stages of personal and professional development. This kind of life-writing, when considered alongside patient accounts, can further contribute to what Anne Hunsaker Hawkins has called "a medicine that is truly human".