To fully understand an illness requires more than empirical knowledge of its scientific basis. Life-writing (biographies and memoirs) of patients and practitioners provides a wealth of first-person accounts about the lived experience of persons. There are many thousands of such accounts that offer a perspective that expands medical knowledge beyond empiricism to advance the humanism of the profession. In this chapter, the history and theoretical basis of such efforts is provided along with a selection of detailed examples of writing from patients and practitioners. Time spent examining these works by patients will usually exceed the amount of time allowed for listening to them in clinical encounters. Time spent reading the accounts of practitioners gives insight into their inner worlds to reveal the complex intermingling of their personal and professional approaches to the world of the sick, elements of their personal development and their more mature perspective. Exploring such accounts cannot take the place of the actual experience of illness itself or living as a practitioner, but careful use of life-writing can help better understand the sentiment attributed to Sir William Osler: “He who studies medicine without books, sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all”. Lives in Medicine offers a way to study the maps and the charts of that uncharted sea in conjunction with textbooks of pathology, physiology, and surgical atlases, it allows them all to serve as our guides. It will be the sailors of that sea that return home with their logs and accounts to create the next generation of maps and charts for those who will follow them “down to the sea in ships.” All these resources belong together on the practitioner’s shelf so that combined with real life experiences, they may expand our sense of what a true “literature of medicine’ might be like.