‘Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story … the pen has been in their hands.’ In no field have Anne Elliot’s famous words from Persuasion been more true than in medicine. Physicians and surgeons have for centuries been men, and the narratives of medicine and of medical history have been in their hands. Patients, male as well as female, have been feminised, in the possibly tendentious sense of subordinated, voiceless. In effect patients were for long the passive and unspeaking subjects on which medicine was practised and through whom discoveries and progress were made. After the introduction of teaching hospitals in the nineteenth century, attending to the patient’s voice by consultants around the bed became more usual and often provided important and fruitful information, but this was the literal speaking voice, responding to questioning, not an independent testimony.