A patients' history of medicine.

摘要

This paper outlines a project originally entitled 'The true history of medicine'. It was intended to be taken with a pinch of salt, like the name of Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel, The true history of the Kelly Gang.1 'If you call a book "true history" each word calls the other into question',2 Carey has said and that was, in part, my purpose. There are good reasons for the adoption of another title, but the original one had its usefulness. It put on the table a claim which is all but indisputable: that medical history has, if not entirely ignored, at least marginalised, the history of patient experience.