ABSTRACT
In his recent book The Healing Tradition, David Greaves,1 a former editor of the Medical Humanities journal, describes accompanying a hospital consultant on a ward round. He describes how the consultant, having been through the notes, charts, x-rays and lab reports, sat on the edge of the bed, took the patient’s hand and asked, ‘And how are you feeling in yourself?’ To a lay person such a question may be unsurprising. We tend not to describe our feelings in a reductive way, certainly when it comes to illness rather than injury. We may have specific pains in our backs or knees or hips, but we are not usually conscious of pains in the liver or spleen, and even ‘stomach ache’ is actually a non-specific complaint. And even when we can be more precise we tend, having discussed the specific problem, to move to a more general account. We say things like, ‘The trouble is, it (whatever it is) makes you feel so rotten’, and ‘you’ here stands for ‘yourself’ or ‘in your self’. As Bruner suggests, ‘“self” is the common coin of our speech: no conversation goes on long without its being unapologetically used’.2
