Serious illness and mortality, those most universal, unavoidable, and frightening of human experiences, are the focus of this pioneering study, which has been hailed as a telling and provocative commentary on our times. As modern medicine has become more scientific and dispassionate, a new literary genre as emerged: pathography, the personal narrative concerning illness, treatment and sometimes death. Hawkins's sensitive reading of numerous pathographies highlights the assumptions, attitudes, and myths that people bring to the medical encounter. One factor emerges again and again in these...