Illness as Narrative - Paperbackby Ann Jurei (Author) For most of literary history, personal confessions about illness were considered too intimate to share publicly. By the mid twentieth century, however, a series of events set the stage for the emergence of the illness narrative. The increase of chronic disease, the transformation of medicine into big business, the women s health movement, the AIDS HIV pandemic, the advent of inexpensive paperbacks, and the rise of self publishing