Doing justice to the patient's view is a precarious undertaking because it is a journey to uncharted regions. To help find our bearings, maps for analysis may be borrowed: those histories which have interpreted for us the work of physicians, their knowledge of diseases, or the medical profession's turning towards the hospital as a place wherein patients and their diseases are most efficiently scrutinized. But even if a patient is liable to accept with one part of his mind the medical version of what ails him, many another aspect of illness will turn to haunt the mind and the emotions, and precipitate an interpretation inconsistent with the more or less neat, and therefore also reassuring, pattern of medical analysis, with its diagnostic and prognostic functions.

In attempting a foray into such a land of variations, the only guideline will be the subjective view, the actions and thoughts of individuals as they are faced with suffering and bodily weakness. Subjective reactions are certainly conditioned by society and by personal values which temper what is done or left undone. The quirks of human nature are often most apparent in the face of unknown or dangerous situations. Whether one is stoic, frightened, resigned, disparaging or resolute can be conditioned, or it can be a response which breaks the mould. All it ultimately tells us about is how life was dealt with, but this, in itself, is an aid to interpretation.