Świadectwo dzienników choroby (XVIII/XIX w.)
The Testimony of Illness Diaries (Eighteenth/Nineteenth Century)

Summary/Abstract: The appearance of the private illness diary at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century relates to the turn to privacy at that time as well as th progress in the medical sciences, changes in patient care and the popularisation of knowledge of the human body’s functions, hygiene, health and illness. Doctors such as Franz Leopold Lafontaine (1801) advice their patients’ closest relatives to record the course of the illness day by day,even hour by hour. These records, about a dozen pages long each, testify to the writers’ desperate attempt to maintain objectivity while systematically describing changes in the patient’s appearance and mental state and making a note of every physiological function until the patient’s death. These texts represent an overlooked aspect of the emerging private diary, which presents a strongly medicalised description of the human body.

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