Eavesdropping on one’s future: Reclaiming prognosis in Henry Daniel’s Liber uricrisiarum and Thomas Hoccleve’s Series

Abstract Overhearing is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the experience of illness, but it has only recently been recognized as a robust mode of communication in the medical encounter. In this article, I link two early English accounts of overhearing one’s own prognosis to modern-day discussions of eavesdropping, both literary-theoretical and clinical. An anecdote in Henry Daniel’s uroscopy Liber uricrisiarum suggests that overhearing can serve as narrative motivation for a patient’s reclamation of their own future, a possibility likewise explored by the protagonist of Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue as he overhears and seeks to undo the communal prognosis attached to his body. I argue that overhearing highlights the epistemic inequalities inherent in prognosis communication, but also usefully complicates the divide between public and private selves and provides room for imagining alternative futures. This article contributes both to a better understanding of overhearing as a narrative device and to building a longer cultural history of illness-related communication.