TY - JOUR T1 - Charting Phelan's ‘To Suffer a Sea Change’ JF - Medical Humanities JO - J Med Humanit SP - 121 LP - 127 DO - 10.1136/medhum-2015-010669 VL - 41 IS - 2 AU - Megan Winkelman AU - Jacqueline Ng AU - Audrey Shafer Y1 - 2015/12/01 UR - http://mh.bmj.com/content/41/2/121.abstract N2 - Physicians and healthcare workers usually perceive their medical record entries as documentation rather than construction. In the following article, we extract a medical record from a narrative, Peggy Phelan's pathography of glaucoma, ‘To Suffer a Sea Change’. From information about encounters described by Phelan, an ophthalmologist reconstructs progress notes similar to those that would be key to a glaucoma patient's medical record. Rather than condemning the arcane pointilism of the medical record as a poverty of language, or isolating the pathography as an academic text, we hope to instead appreciate what their collaborative dialogue offers the study of disease. While the points of divergence between these texts will demonstrate failures in communication, they will also unearth an enriched dialogue. ER -