Age In Health

06/05/2026

The Prisoner ran for just 17 episodes in 1967. Number Six spends every one of them insisting on the same thing:

"I am not a number. I am a free man."

It's a line that sounds dramatic. Theatrical, even. Until you sit in the back of a car with someone who's just come out of hospital and realise they've understood it completely — without ever having watched the show.

Tom had been fit, robust, independent. A man who hadn't seen a doctor since birth. Nine months of tests, referrals, consultants, medications, and bypass surgery later, he came home a different person. Not because of the illness. Not because of the operation.

Because the system had processed him. Filed him. Named his legs without naming him.

In my new piece for Age In Health, I use Tom's story to think about something we rarely discuss openly in health and care: the damage that isn't on the discharge summary. The self that doesn't come home with the body.

For those of us working in care settings, this isn't abstract. Every interaction is either an act of recognition or an act of erasure. We don't always get to choose which — but we always get to be aware of it.

https://garrycostain.substack.com/p/those-bastards-made-me-into-a-patient

On personhood, the medical gaze, and the self that doesn't come home

05/05/2026

https://garrycostain.substack.com/p/those-bastards-made-me-into-a-patient

On personhood, the medical gaze, and the self that doesn't come home

04/05/2026

"Those bastards have made me into a patient."

That's what Tom said, after surgery that had gone better than anyone dared hope.

He wasn't angry about the operation. He wasn't angry that his body had let him down. He was angry about something harder to name — and harder to recover from.

In my latest piece for Age in Health, I explore what Tom's words reveal about the medical gaze, Sartrean existentialism, and the self that doesn't quite come home from hospital.

Sartre famously wrote "Hell is other people." But he didn't mean that people are annoying. He meant that other people define us — and that we may come to see ourselves as they see us. The medical gaze is a particularly powerful version of that. Under it, Tom stopped being Tom. He became a case. A set of legs. A number.

This matters deeply in care. It matters for how we talk to people, how we structure assessments, and how we think about dignity and personhood — not as abstract values on a wall, but as something real that can be damaged and lost.

If you work in health, social care, or simply think about what it means to be human: I'd love you to read this.

On personhood, the medical gaze, and the self that doesn't come home

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