MEDICINE HAS been written as the story of doctors, their practices and achievements. Recently, there has been a shift to the patient. Writers from widely different fields – neurology (Oliver Sacks, Awakenings, 1973, revised edition 1982), literary criticism (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 1985), medical history (Roy Porter, Patients and Practitioners, 1985; Mind Forg'd Manacles, 1987) and anthropology, (Arthur Kleinman, Social Origins of Distress and Disease, 1986; The Illness Narratives, 1988) – have converged to focus upon the history and experience of the individual sufferer. This book seeks to build upon and augment their work by examining the words and experience of a major writer and spectacular patient.

I wish to acknowledge the help of the following scholars and medical historians in preparation of this book: Miss E. Allen, Curator of the Hunterian Museum; Professor Harold Attwood; Dr C. H. Brock; the late Professor Kenneth Dewhurst; Dr J. D. Fleeman; Dr Graham Nicholls of the Birthplace Museum. I am especially indebted to Dr Dennis Gibbs of the London Hospital.

The editors of the Australian journals The Critical Review and Meridian published earlier versions of parts of chapters 6 and 7 respectively, and I thank them. The Research Grants Committee of the School of Humanities, La Trobe University, gave me a travel grant which allowed me to research part of chapter 3.

My colleagues and friends in the English Department, La Trobe University, have helped me in dozens of ways, with suggestions and comments, criticisms and translations, and not least in enduring the papers in which I tried out parts of this book.