Abstract

As a young medical student, I was frustrated by the rather mechanistic, though undoubtedly therapeutic, way in which I was taught. It seemed to want me to approach patients clinically, and though with respect also with a distance which reduced simple human contact. We were not expected to be interested in what it was like to be ill, but rather to elicit the correct signs and symptoms in order to diagnose. At the time I was also reading more widely, within literature and philosophy, searching – in part – for a more humane perspective. Much philosophy was beyond me – and still is – but then, as a young man I found myself sympathetic to the phenomenological approach. In medicine, by day, I learnt lists of diseases and their presentation, whilst by night I would read of other approaches respectful of the first person experience, which might help me reach what it was like to live, say, with a chronic neurological impairment.