Coming soon. One of the very first things I wrote was an account of having asthma. I wrote this aged 12 in 1982 at the request of my paediatric consultant. I had been hospitalised on and off for over a year, and I told him ‘he didn’t understand’ what having asthma was really like. He told me to write about it, and what I wrote was shared with all the doctors and nurses on the hospital ward. Written by hand and glued onto cardboard with a pink cover, these four pages form the basis of a reflection on the ‘private troubles and public issues’ of asthma more than fifty years later.
(c) John Goodwin, 2025