Frances Burney and the Doctors

"Frances Burney is primarily known as a novelist and playwright but in recent years there has been an increased interest in the medical writings found in her private letters and journals. John Wiltshire advocates Burney as the unconscious pioneer of the modern genre of pathography, or the illness narrative. Presenting her accounts of distinct medical events, from her own now infamous operation without anaesthetic, to those she witnessed, such as the 'madness' of George III; the inoculation of her son against smallpox; and the nursing of her dying husband, Burney's dramatic skill exposes ethical issues and conflicts between patients and doctors and, sometimes, among medical personnel themselves. Her accounts are linked to a range of brilliant modern narratives in which similar events and operations occur in the changed conditions of the public hospital. The genre that Burney initiated continues to make an important contribution to our understanding of medical practice"--

"Introduction 'Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story ... the pen has been in their hands.' In no field have Anne Elliot's famous words from Persuasion been more true than in medicine. Physicians and surgeons have for centuries been men, and the narratives of medicine, and medical history, have been in their hands. Patients, male as well as female, have been feminised, in the possibly tendentious sense of subordinated, voiceless. In effect patients were for long the passive and unspeaking subjects on which medicine was practised and through whom discoveries and progress were made. After the introduction of teaching hospitals in the nineteenth century, attending to the patient's voice by consultants around the bed became more usual, and often provided important and fruitful information, but this was the literal speaking voice, responding to questioning, not an independent testimony. Patients may have written accounts of their experiences of illness and their medical treatment, but these were fragmentary, informal, or, at best, parts of works devoted to quite different ends"--