In this article, I argue that iconographic pathography provides a transformational form of storytelling for ill persons and the communities around them. This work addresses the reduction of illness narration to clinical vocabularies. It targets often excluded communities—chronic and terminal narrators—as well as promotes ethical practices of creative and collaborative inclusion for ecclesial communities. I use Devan Stahl’s Imaging and Imagining Illness as an example of this distinctive form of pathography, first differentiating it from other narrative forms of the genre as well as contextualizing its decentralized narrational form with criteria drawn from icons’ emergence within early Christian art. I claim that such decentralized narration changes the trajectory of self-understanding for the ill person as well as the ethical response required for those who bear witness to such narratives.

This paper describes the content and evolution of a fourth-year course for medical students on teaching pathographies of mental illness. (It is a follow-up to Nathan Carlin’s Pathographies of Mental Illness that appeared as an Element in the Bioethics and Neuroethics series published by Cambridge University Press.) The course originally centered on classic (and some contemporary) memoirs; however, responding to student evaluations, newer material now ensures more diversity, with material written by women and people of color, and describes the difference that can make.

In 2012, Dartmouth College renamed its medical school, founded in 1797, the Audrey and Theodor Geisel School of Medicine. Using the renaming of the medical school of Dartmouth College as a foil, I offer in this article a vision of what it might mean to align Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, with doctors by examining Geisel’s You’re Only Old Once! A Book for Obsolete Children. In this article, I derive four critiques of modern medicine from the book and offer four strategies as to how these critiques could be explored in medical education. If You’re Only Old Once! is read as a pathography, I argue that it can be used as a resource for medical education.