Intoxicated by My Illness

Anatole Broyard, a writer and former book critic for the New York Times, wrote this book between the time he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and his death 14 months later. What is compelling about this book is his insistence that medicine acknowledge whole persons. “When a doctor refuses to acknowledge a patient, he is, in effect abandoning him to his illness,” he wrote. The book is also full of wonderful humour and style. In his inimitable way, the author was saying that there were aspects of self that cancer would never touch.