Nothing is more personal than illness and healing. So medical memoirs are not monolithic, and are written by doctors, patients, the loved ones of the sufferers, and others. The eight memorable memoirs here, from the past to the present, the best ones I believe, consist of writers of different racial and economic backgrounds, genders, and faiths.
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John Bayley, Elegy for Iris
A moving, affectionate tribute to one of the most brilliant minds of her time, a Booker Prize-winning novelist and a philosopher, Iris Murdoch, whose intellect descended into oblivion due to the cruelty of Alzheimer’s disease. This tribute is rendered by no less a figure than John Bayley, a literary critic and novelist himself, a past chairman of the Booker Prize Committee, an Oxford professor, and Iris’s husband of 43 years.
Even with her ravages, he loves her just he as did when the “entrancing, youthful philosopher stole his heart at Oxford’s St. Antony’s dance in 1954.” About one particular Christmas Bayley writes:
