Medicine teems with anecdotes, brief, pointed accounts of healthcare episodes, informed by observations and narrative arguments. Initially denoting hitherto undivulged, but notable, historical events, anecdotes narrated by doctors were not easily distinguishable from clinical cases. Those recounted by patients and carers in the modern era are the subject of this chapter, which investigates how they grasp, size up, and characterize human vulnerabilities, resulting from illness and inequalities in healthcare knowledge and power. An unregulated and anti-authoritarian idiom that does not seek to isolate events and experiences from subjective thoughts and feelings about them, these sorts of anecdotes can critically evaluate medical services and glimpse the truth about healthcare situations. Contemporary medicine, however, views anecdotal observations and viewpoints as biased and untrustworthy. Despite the current climate of scepticism concerning anecdotal information, anecdotes remain prolific oral and literary interventions, that provide vital insights into the interpersonal and social relations of healthcare.

Delarivier Manley both ventriloquizes and parodies male classical satirical traditions as she satirically rewrites Whig narratives of the Glorious Revolution. Manley frames her retort to the male wits of her day not merely as literal conversations in her political secret histories but through a revision to the traditional genres she was working in, thus effecting the conversation at the meta-level of genre. From her early epistolary work, Letters Writen by Mrs. Manley (1696), through her best-selling New Atalantis (1709) and her Adventures of Rivella (1714), Manley demonstrates her vision of satire as a mode simultaneously in parodic conversation with classical satire, political secret history, official history, travelogue, romance, pamphlet, periodical, and memoir. Across her career, Manley created satires that were not merely “parasitic” on prior genres but were the grounds for intergeneric conversation and the invention of new hybrid genres. She well understood that the most effective retort to the Whig satirists of her era would be to redefine the genres in which the satirical history of their own time would be written.