An Annotated Bibliography of Autopathographies

J K Aronson
 

The following is an incomplete list of accounts of their authors' own experiences with illness (including ghosted accounts). Most of them are single volume autobiographical accounts, but the list also includes some books of essays or single essays that have appeared in books; these are marked with an asterisk.

This annotated bibliography is work in progress. Please tell me about other titles that you think I should add.

I have for the most part accepted the diagnoses with which these accounts are labelled, even when I have had doubts. However, I have reclassified Morag Coate's account under manic-depression, since I have reason to believe that the diagnosis of schizophrenia with which R D Laing labelled her illness was wrong.

In general I have not included the following categories:

• Accounts of other people's illnesses - for example, the many books of case histories by people such as Oliver Sacks and Harold Klawans, first-hand accounts about individual people, historical analyses, such as "George III and the Mad-Business" by Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, and books of essays (e.g. William Ober's "Boswell's Clap").
• Newspaper or journal articles.
• Semi-autobiographical novels—for example, "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold" by Evelyn Waugh, "The Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs, "Cain's Book" by Alexander Trocchi.
• Fictions about illness—for example, "The Idiot" by Dostoevsky, "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann, "The Counterlife" by Philip Roth.
• Poems—for example, Anne Sexton's "To Bedlam and Part Way Back" and Sylvia Plath's "Ariel"

Writing critiques of material of this sort is a losing game. These people have written accounts of times during which they were in pain of some sort, whether physical or mental, often both, and to criticize their accounts of themselves may seem churlish. However, in preparing my brief annotations I have put aside any emotional response I may have had to what are sometimes heart-rending accounts and have tried to give a physician's unsentimental opinion on the value of the books as sources of information from the medical point of view.

I am keen to receive copies of published reviews of any of these books.