Students are expected to prepare a reflective analysis (5 doubled-spaced pages) of a published patient “pathography.” A patient pathography (as used here) is a first-person, published memoir focused on an illness, medical condition, or disability.

When analyzing your pathography, please address the following questions in your reflections.

1. 1. (1) Consider the extent to which any social determinants of health or other social factors (e.g., race/ethnicity, culture, gender, literacy, age) may have altered the lens through which the author interpreted his/her experience.
   2. (2) Consider how the social determinants of health or other social factors influenced the care (both formal and informal) the person received.
   3. (3) What sources of health information did the author use? How did the author prioritize them or decide whether they were credible or reliable?

Please refer to the applicable literature and concepts from the course and peer-reviewed literature to support your conclusions.

You may choose a book that is not from this list. The list is to give you a sense of the range available to you. However, I have deliberately chosen not to include on this list examples from people who are healthcare providers. If you choose a book not from this list, please choose one from someone who is not a professional clinician.

Some patient pathographies:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Autobiography of a Face (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. by Lucy Grealy

A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing by Reynolds Price

Anatomy of an Illness by Norman Cousins

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor

An Unquiet Mind (bipolar disease) by Kay Redfield Jamison

Thinking in Pictures, and other reports from my life with autism by Temple Grandin

The Day My Brain Exploded: A True Story by Ashok Rajamani

Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour