Narrative Medicine: Honoring the stories of Illness

Narrative medicine has emerged in response to a commodified health care system that places corporate and bureaucratic concerns over the needs of the patient. Generated from a confluence of sources including humanities and medicine, primary care medicine, narratology, and the study of doctor-patient relationships, narrative medicine is medicine practiced with the competence to recognise, absorb, interpret and be moved by the stories of illness. By placing events in temporal order, with beginnings, middles and ends, and by establishing connections among things using metaphor and figural language, narrative medicine helps doctors to recognise patients and diseases, convey knowledge, accompany patients through the ordeals of illness - and according to Rita Charon, can ultimately lead to more humane, ethical and effective healthcare.
Contents I. What is Narrative Medicine 1. The Sources of Narrative Medicine 2. Bridging Health Care´s Divides 3. Narrative Features of Medicine II. Narratives of Illness 4. Telling One´s Life 5. The Patient, the Body, and the Self III. Developing Narrative Competence 6. Close Reading 7. Attention, Representation, and Affiliation 8. The Parallel Chart IV. Dividends of Narrative Medicine 9. Bearing Witness 10. The Bioethics of Narrative Medicine 11. A Narrative Vision for Health Care