This research-creation dissertation investigates how artists’ books’ text, images, form, materiality, and other sensory engagements merge to communicate lived experiences of illness and disability. I ask how the meanings of these abstracted book-bodies adapt and change when they are re-interpreted by readers, and how this can be an effective strategy for forming relational understandings of what it is like to live with illness. Within the framework of a phenomenological practice, I show the generative potential for empathy and intercorporeal exchange that often occurs when engaging with another’s artist’s book. Next, I describe past practices of artists who have deployed artists’ books in negotiating the biomedicalization of their illness experience. I then reflect upon my own contribution to the intersection of artists’ books and healthcare, Field Notes: How to Be With. Finally, I analyze the outcomes of artist’s book workshops I developed and conducted with multiple communities, including biomedical personnel. These distinct, but inter-related research-creation practices indicate how patient communities can devise tacit and multi-sensory expressions of embodied phenomena that may otherwise be difficult to communicate through verbal means alone. From a health humanities perspective, the pedagogical potential of reading and making artists’ books may assist in resisting systemic pressures for clinical efficiency and unseat biases towards illness and disability. This research-creation dissertation thus serves as a philosophical, pedagogical, and pragmatic example of how to engage with artists’ books in health contexts. It examines how the formation of archival, hand-made book objects constitutes a legacy of lived experience that may be called upon, again and again, to share and understand life, death, illness, health, unease, and wellbeing.