Reducing fear and the risk of death in Marfan syndrome: a Chaucerian pilgrimage

Chaucer’s characters in The Canterbury Tales meet on their journey to the shrine of Thomas à Becket. They are on a pilgrimage, a special kind of journey that brings a diverse group of people together in a common purpose. As they converge on the place of pilgrimage, the tales they tell are informed by the varied experiences of their lives. The stories we tell here are of individuals brought together by a single objective: to find a solution better than total root replacement for people whose lives are threatened by aortic dilatation due to Marfan syndrome. Chaucer’s pilgrims meet in the Tabard Inn in Southwark, where their journey to Canterbury is to begin. This modern journey began in St George’s Hospital at the 2000 meeting of the Marfan Association, when the surgeon [TT] told his tale, an account of best current practice and its attendant risks.