The Politics of Personal Experience
Writing a History of Munchausen Syndromes
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publishing:25th Mar '26
£155.00
This title is due to be published on 25th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
How should a historian with personal experience of their topics write about them? Exploring the author’s own experiences with Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP), this book analyzes how various historians have managed “the personal” and their scholarship.
It shows how influences on history such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, and literary theory have furnished the tools for historians to be critical about their selfhood and their scholarship. It also examines how histories that try to resist the marginalisation of groups (on grounds of gender, race, sexuality and mental health) have sophisticated discussions around the implications of the historian’s experiences for their scholarship. While these have been intermittently taken up in various ways, discussions of the specific implications of experiences on the scholarship remain rare. The book uses these discussions and these tools throughout an archival and intellectual history of the diagnoses of Munchausen and MSbP, showing specific implications for this study and proper accounting of the shape and content of this history.
This groundbreaking volume offers academic historians an opportunity for reflection on the link between who they consider themselves to be, and what they think, argue and write.
"Into an absorbing academic account of these perplexing patients since their identification in the 1950s, Chris Millard weaves both a discourse on historical and indeed clinical method, and a personal quest for understanding his own mother’s Munchausen behaviour. Written with lucidity, intelligence and compassion, The Politics of Personal Experience: Writing a History of Munchausen Syndromes is a truly original and remarkable work that will be widely read."
Colin Jones,Emeritus Professor, Queen Mary University of London, UK
"Millard interrogates the role of the personal in historical writing with an incisive edge rarely found in histories of medicine, adding a richness to the story of factitious illness that avoids easy claims to experiential knowledge. He is as critical of his own experience as he is of other sources, elegantly balancing different elements of the narrative to take the reader on a thought-provoking journey."
Sarah Chaney, author of Am I Normal?: The 200-Year Search for Normal People and Why They Don’t Exist
"Combining analysis of 'the personal' in historical scholarship with a brave experiment in weaving his own past into a new history of Munchausen Syndromes, Millard’s inventive interrogation prompts us to rethink how, why, and where the self emerges in research and writing about the past."
Tracey Loughran,University of Essex, UK
ISBN: 9781041159452
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
204 pages