Lilly Sováry was born in Hungary and later became a U.S. citizen. She was a victim of Cushing's Disease (hyperadrenocorticism secondary to excessive pituitary secretion of of adrenocorticotropic hormone, or ACTH), for which she was first treated at Stanford University Hospital in 1965-1966. In 1967 she was transferred to the Metabolic Research Center at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. She rejected adrenalectomy, then the customary treatment, but underwent experimental pituitary irradiation treatments at Stanford (in a 1979 interview with Kristine Bertelsen of UCSF's Medical Anthropology Department, Sováry stated that there were two series of irradiation treatments -one in 1966, and a second in 1968). In 1971 she was again admitted to the Metabolic Research Center at UCSF for experimental hormone treatment, but she became very ill and this treatment was discontinued.

In order to participate fully in her treatments, she began her own research into her condition and the treatment options available to her. At the same time, in order to stave off the prognosis of mental decline considered inherent to the disease, she began compiling her unusual creative response to her medical experiences. The resulting materials are a blend of medical documentation, correspondence, collage, poetry, meditation and unclassifiable creative expression that provide a compelling picture of the human organism in the face of catastrophic illness. As her treatment progressed, the author reviewed progressive drafts of her work with clinical professionals at UCSF. In October of 1973 she presented a series of three lectures titled "Education and Psychology" at the Langley Porter Clinic under the auspices of the Committee on Art & Lectures. In 1980 her interviews with Drs. Carroll Brodsky and George Stone were videotaped and used for the course "Psychosocial Aspects of Medical Care."

By the mid-1970s she had been diagnosed with Addison's Disease (caused by hypofunction of the adrenal glands), and by the time this collection was accessioned in 1983, her medical records (excerpted throughout these papers) identified at least eighteen different disorders.

Ms. Sováry has characterized her work as "a presentation of the case history of an individual's struggle with an incurable disease and an unconventional look at the medical world," and has chosen to deposit this work with UCSF's manuscript collection as a "'non-academic' work for educational purposes."