What was fascinating to me was that medical sociology had, again, no category for the actual experience of being ill. They did epidemiology, they did professionalization of medicine, they did organization of hospitals but…  being ill, simply wasn’t on the academic agenda at that point. Professor Arthur Frank: The Development of Narrative Practices in Medicine c.1960–c.2000, pp. 15

Professor Arthur Frank PhD (b. 1946) trained as a medical sociologist at Yale University. He is the author of a memoir of critical illness, At the Will of the Body, and a study of first-person illness narratives, The Wounded Storyteller, among many other works. Dr Frank is an elected Fellow of the Hastings Center and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was the 2008 recipient of the Abbyann Lynch Medal for Bioethics, awarded by the Royal Society of Canada. He is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Calgary, where he has taught since 1975, and a professor at Betanien College of nursing, Bergen, Norway, which is starting a narrative nursing programme.