The politics of personal experience: Writing a history of Munchausen Syndromes

How should a historian with personal experience of their topics write about them? Exploring the author’s own experiences with Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP), this book analyzes how various historians have managed “the personal” and their scholarship.

It shows how influences on history such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, and literary theory have furnished the tools for historians to be critical about their selfhood and their scholarship. It also examines how histories that try to resist the marginalisation of groups (on grounds of gender, race, sexuality and mental health) have sophisticated discussions around the implications of the historian’s experiences for their scholarship. While these have been intermittently taken up in various ways, discussions of the specific implications of experiences on the scholarship remain rare. The book uses these discussions and these tools throughout an archival and intellectual history of the diagnoses of Munchausen and MSbP, showing specific implications for this study and proper accounting of the shape and content of this history.

This groundbreaking volume offers academic historians an opportunity for reflection on the link between who they consider themselves to be, and what they think, argue and write.