made the art for the sufferer and the witness

This dazzling essay articulates the fury Sontag felt at the lazy thinking and muddled metaphors that cling to western ideas of health and sickness – particularly those that turn blame on the sufferer: “A disease of the lungs is, metaphorically, a disease of the soul … ‘Malignant’ or ‘Benign’ tumours are like forms of demonic possession.” William Styron Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) This dazzling essay articulates the fury Sontag felt at the lazy thinking that cling to western ideas of health Susan Sontag Illness as Metaphor (1978)

“Hat”, as he called it, inspired a whole genre of philosophically reflective medical writing, nourished by art and literature. His gracious rebuttal cited pressures on his time, and regretted the decline in his clinical and teaching work (he was by then 64). I first encountered this book in 1997, having recently graduated with a degree in neuroscience I promptly wrote to Sacks in New York to ask if I could join him in clinic. Neurologist Oliver Sacks Photograph: Adam Scourfield/AP

Whee-ee-ee‑ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light … I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.” Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) The description of ECT is unforgettable: “Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Published in January 1963 under a pseudonym, only a month before Plath killed herself, The Bell Jar is a glimpse into one experience of profound suicidal anguish, as well as the failings of 1950s psychiatry. Berger asks: “What is the effect of facing, trying to understand, hoping to overcome the extreme anguish of other persons five or six times a week?” Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar (1963) The result is a masterpiece of witness, sensitively exploring the way medical practice offers daily reflections on existential questions. In 1966 Berger went to live with a rural GP in Gloucestershire, and for six weeks accompanied him on every clinic and home visit. In a passage from his autobiography, he gives a moving and utterly persuasive argument for the value of medical work in the creation of literature: “That is why as a writer I have never felt that medicine interfered with me but rather that it was my very food and drink, the very thing which made it possible for me to write.” John Berger A Fortunate Man (1997) Williams, better known as a modernist poet, was a physician for most of his career in Rutherford, New Jersey, and wrote exquisite stories that feel like direct transcriptions from the clinic. Coming towards the 20th century it is a tough choice between the medical stories of Chekhov and Bulgakov, but the latter’s A Country Doctor’s Notebook examines with exemplary humility the rabbit-in-the‑headlights shock experienced by every new junior doctor, as relevant now as it was when Bulgakov qualified in 1916 – here he is confronted with a strangulated hernia: “Forty-eight days ago I qualified ‘with distinction’ but distinction is one thing, and hernia is another.” William Carlos Williams The Doctor Stories (1932-62)īulgakov and Williams were almost exact contemporaries.

Made the art for the sufferer and the witness