Bix dot Blog

Narrative medicine might be understood then, as an acknowledgment that, as with our writing projects, a doctor’s relationship with their patient should be open to rephrasing, to a changing of the basic language used in order to describe the expressed symptoms of the body, and the priorities and preferences of the patient in terms of their treatment. Narrative medicine accepts that a patient’s efforts to get better “cannot be fragmented away from the deepest parts of their lives,” including the stories they tell “in medical interviews, late-night emergency telephone calls, or the wordless rituals of the physical exam.”

—Marcus Creaghan, in “On Narrative Medicine and Finding a New Language For Illness”