Narrative Medicine

Catalog description

Narrative Medicine is a field that seeks to fortify healthcare practice with narrative competence: the capacity to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness. We explore the relationship between narrativity and identity. We engage in literary study that allows healthcare providers to better comprehend patients, convey knowledge, and accompany patients through the ordeal of illness. Narrative competence includes rigorous training in close reading, attentive listening, reflective writing, and bearing witness to suffering. By placing events in temporal order (with beginnings, middles, and ends) and establishing connections using metaphor and figurative language, narrative medicine employs elements of creativity and literary study to help us to recognize patients and diseases, convey knowledge, and accompany patients through the ordeal of illness.