Wistrand, Jonatan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7954-219X
Funding for this research was provided by:
Greta och Johan Kocks stiftelse
Article History
First Online: 28 January 2020
Compliance with ethical standards
: The author declare that he has no conflict of interest.
: This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed.
: The three testimonies interpreted in this article have all been published earlier by their respective author and thus no previously unpublished information on any human being was included in the study.
: <sup>1</sup> The number of published pathographies has increased rapidly in recent decades, but there are also examples from the early twentieth century of autobiographical illness narratives written by doctors. At that time, such narratives were often published in anthologies; for example, Alfred Grotjahn’s <i>Ärzte als Patienten. Subjektive Krankengeschichten in ärztlichen Selbstschilderungen</i> (1929).<sup>2</sup> Interesting to note, a similar idea was described already during Antiquity. According to the Hippocratic Corpus of <i>c</i>.400 BC a good doctor is required to ‘look healthy … for the common crowd consider those who are not of this excellent condition to be unable to take care of others’ (Potter 1995).<sup>3</sup> When applied to a medical setting, Goffman’s description of social interaction according to dramaturgical principles bears a resemblance to Talcott Parsons notion (1975) of an implicit agreement between the doctor and the patient in order to create predictability in the medical encounter.<sup>4</sup> A similar conclusion, with reference to Goffman’s two regions, is described in an anthropological study from early twenty-first century based on interviews with Norwegian doctors (Ingstad and Moe Christie 2001).<sup>5</sup>See also Jane Macnaughton’s description of how modern medicine risks losing sight of the individual when the pathophysiological processes are privileged and healing is reduced to tweaking ‘boxes of molecules to which can be added another molecule that can sort out an imperfect reaction’ (2011, 930).