Introduction

This introduction begins with a confession: that the author of this history of Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy has direct personal experience of the two categories they are writing about. It then asks how this link between personal experience and scholarly subject matter might be managed and analysed, especially in academic history. It details how some historians and other scholars have written about the concept of experience. It also explains why two kinds of historians’ experiences are not being seriously considered in this book: historians’ autobiographies, normally written apart from the historian's historical output at the end of a career, and the project of ego-histoire, pioneered by Pierre Nora in the 1980s. It finishes with an outline of the three ways that the subsequent parts of the book will tackle experiences in works of history. Refusal commits to not letting experiential disclosures sit apart from analysis and critique; potential locates sophisticated experiential discussions in three intellectual traditions that have influenced history (anthropology, psychoanalysis and ‘postmodernism’), but have not consistently carried these discussions through to the written histories.