In this pioneering volume, Peter L. Rudnytsky and Rita Charon bring together distinguished contributors from medicine, psychoanalysis, and literature to explore the multiple intersections between their respective fields and the emerging discipline of narrative medicine, which seeks to introduce the values and methods of literary study into clinical education and practice. Organized into four sections—contextualizing narrative medicine, psychoanalytic interventions, the patient's voice, and acts of reading—the essays take the reader into the emergency room, the consulting room, and the classroom. They range from the panoramas of intellectual history to the close-ups of literary and clinical analysis, and they speak with the voice of the patient as well as the physician or professor, reminding us that these are often the same.

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 recognize, 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 recognize 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 health care. Trained in medicine and in literary studies, Rita Charon is a pioneer of and authority on the emerging field of narrative medicine. In this important and long-awaited book she provides a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the conceptual principles underlying narrative medicine, as well as a practical guide for implementing narrative methods in health care. A true milestone in the field, it will interest general readers, and experts in medicine and humanities, and literary theory.

The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine articulates the ideas, methods, and practices of narrative medicine. Written by the originators of the field, this book provides the authoritative starting place for any clinicians or scholars committed to learning of and eventually teaching or practicing narrative medicine.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- 1 Narrative and meaning -- 2 The dialogic nature of narrative in creativity and the clinical exchange -- 3 Resilience, seeking, and narratives about the self -- 4 Music as narrative -- 5 The dream narrative -- 6 Narrative tradition: placing the clinical narrative within a broader narrative tradition -- 7 Storying suffering of every conceivable sort -- 8 The Ghost Kingdom: the secret narrative of the adoptee's birth and origins -- 9 At the edge of the knowable: personal reflections on how far narrative takes us -- 10 Narrative contributions to the core sense of self, identity, and individuality -- Index

At the heart of any therapeutic encounter there is always a story. Patients seeking help bring with them stories, spoken or untold, fragmentary and whole, that collectively make up their own personal narrative, their lived autobiography. Whatever else their tasks, a central part of the doctor's or therapist's job is to facilitate the telling of these stories, to make meaning out of them and find the patterns within them. The aim of this book is to rehabilitate stories and story telling within medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapy and to consider a narrative approach both as a theoretical paradigm and a practical, therapeutic tool.

First published in 2002. The doctor patient relationship starts with a story. Doctors' notes, a patient's chart, the recommendations of ethics committees and insurance justifications all hinge on written and verbal narrative interaction. The practice of narrative profoundly affects decision making, patient health and treatment and the everyday practice of medicine. In this edited collection, the contributors provide conceptual foundations, practical guidelines and theoretical considerations central to the practice of narrative ethics.

Edited by two leading general practitioners and with contributions from over 20 authors, this book covers a wide range of topics to do with narrative in medicine. It includes a wealth of real examples of patients narratives and addresses theoretical and practical issues including the use of narrative as a therapeutic tool, teaching narrative to students, philosophical issues, narrative in legal and ethical decisions, narrative in nursing, and the narrative medical record.