AE: Narrative Medicine

0 credits · School of Medicine

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the importance of the humanities in medical education into sharp focus. “Today, we are witnessing a new permeability between the arts and the sciences,” writes Rita Charon, a founder of Narrative medicine. “Scientists are urged to promote transformative creativity in their trainees. Nobelists credit surprise and the imagination for their insights.” In the wake of the pandemic, there is a critical need for medical training and care that is inclusive, humanistic, and that equips learners with tools and methods that foster curiosity, creativity, and connection—with peers, themselves, and most importantly, their patients. Disciplines such as oral history and literary criticism have the potential to generate knowledge of health and disease that can be of profound importance to clinicians, patients, and public health professionals. Such knowledge extends to topics that include health disparities, the lived experience of illness, the genesis and history of our current system of medical education, and beyond. As defined by Charon, “Narrative medicine is a commitment to understanding patients’ lives, caring for the caregivers, and giving voice to the suffering.” At its core, Narrative medicine proposes that patients and their illness experience represent a story – one with characters, deep relationships, and veiled, unexplored, and thereby misunderstood perspectives. Patients often report that physicians do not listen to them, and do not hear their story. Like other skills in medicine, the ability to attend to and understand a patient’s narrative is one that may be taught. By using the technique of close reading to analyze stories, poems, literary works, music, and the visual arts, physicians can become more observant and attuned to the subtext of a situation. Using close reading on a variety of media makes physicians more adept at the collection and interpretation of stories. They may then apply the same skill of close reading (and its counterpart, attentive listening) to better interpret and attend to the story and lived experience of their patients, thereby fostering mutual understanding and connection 1) individually between patient and physician, 2) by extension, between patients and the interprofessional healthcare team. By collecting and interpreting the health stories of patients with a narrative lens, student-physicians will not only be able to better care for their patients, but for themselves as well. [0]