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On All Things Considered this week (Sunday 26 August at 8.31am, repeated Wednesday 29 August at 6.32pm), there's another chance to hear Roy Jenkins in conversation with Cardiff-based psychiatrist Mary Self.

At the age of 34, Dr Self had planned her funeral, and with her husband, taken her two young children on what they thought would be their last holiday together.

A rare cancer which led to the amputation of a leg during her teens had recurred unexpectedly. Neither surgery nor treatment held any hope, and the best specialists in the country deemed her incurable. Then quite suddenly, the cancer disappeared.

A doctor herself, the daughter of a GP and married to a hospital consultant, she was well aware of terms like 'spontaneous remission', but she was convinced that her cure was quite literally a miracle. She remains convinced and has published her story in the book From Medicine to Miracle.