The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine

by Rita Charon, Sayantani DasGupta, Nellie Hermann

Narrative medicine is a fresh discipline of health care that helps patients and health professionals to tell and listen to the complex and unique stories of illness. The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine expresses the collective experience and discoveries of the originators of the field. Arising at Columbia University in 2000 from roots in the humanities and patient-centered care, narrative medicine draws patients, doctors, nurses, therapists, and health activists together to re-imagine a health care based on trust and trustworthiness, humility, and mutual recognition.

Over a decade of education and research has crystallized the goals and methods of narrative medicine, leading to increasingly powerful means to improve the care that patients receive. The methods described in this book harness creativity and insight to help the professionals in being with patients, not just to diagnose and treat them but to
bear witness to what they undergo. Narrative medicine training in literary theory, philosophy, narrative ethics, and the creative arts increases clinicians' capacity to perceive the turmoil and suffering borne by patients and to help them to cohere or endure the chaos of illness.

Narrative medicine has achieved an international reputation and reach. Many health care settings adopt methods of narrative medicine in teaching and practice. Through the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine graduate program and health professions school curricula at Columbia University, more and more clinicians and scholars have obtained the rigorous training necessary to practice and teach narrative medicine. This text is offered to all who seek the opportunity for disciplined training in narrative medicine. By clearly articulating our principles and practice, this book provides the standards of the field for those who want to join us in seeking authenticity, recognition, affiliation, and justice in a narrative health care.

Genres: Nonfiction, Academia, Writing, Medical, Medicine

360 pages, Hardcover

Published November 4, 2016

About the author

Rita Charon is a physician, literary scholar and the founder and executive director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She currently practices as a general internist at the Associates in Internal Medicine at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and is a professor of clinical medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University.
Charon is the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness and co-editor of Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics and Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine.

Reviews

[Janel Atlas · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important book that provides a thoughtful overview to the field of narrative medicine, written collectively by Rita Charon and other writers/thinkers/scholars affiliated with the Columbia University School of Medicine's Narrative Medicine program. It’s divided into 7 Parts: Intersubjectivity (that mostly talk about the self and how reading, writing workshops, and narrative discussion help us think about/talk about the self); Dualism, Personhood, and Embodiment (which gives an overview of the history of dualism in western thought, philosophical responses to the false binary, and how training in narrative ethics is vital for health care providers); Identities in Pedagogy (a piece by Sayantani DasGupta about pedagogical frames for cripping, queering, unhoming health humanities); Close Reading (about how listening/reading closely is the central commitment of narrative medicine; Creativity (by Nellie Hermann, the writer, about the purposes of creative writing and how to teach it in health care professions; Qualititative Ways of Knowing (one piece by Edgar Rivera Colon that’s quite personal and lyrical, about how qualitative research methods are about an embodied, reflexive practice to see the world); and Clinical Practice (by Charon an Marcus, talking about how narrative methods have changed health care for the better.

[Bruce Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The authors promise a rigorous view of the field and they deliver.

[Margaret Adams]

This is the kind of book you need read with a lot of blank paper nearby so you can take notes. It's a dense and well-done critical theory (the title is an homage to Osler's seminal textbook) that is admittedly on the venn diagram of some of my main interests. The text draws on literary theory, philosophy, narrative ethics and the creative arts in an attempt to "help professionals not just diagnose and treat patients but to bear witness to what they undergo." My main critique is that in places the text works too hard to codify this emerging field and comes off as a justification of Columbia University's Master of Science in Narrative Medicine program. Overall a great read, one I will be returning to a lot.