Narrative Medicine Honoring the Stories of Illness

by Charon, Rita

• ISBN13: 9780195166750
• ISBN10: 0195166752
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-03-02
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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 ofdoctor-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 metaphorand 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, aswell 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.

Author Biography

Rita Charon is Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University.

Table of Contents

What Is Narrative Medicine?
The Sources of Narrative Medicine	p. 3
Bridging Health Care's Divides	p. 17
Narrative Features of Medicine	p. 39
Narratives of Illness
Telling One's Life	p. 65
The Patient, the Body, and the Self	p. 85
Developing Narrative Competence
Close Reading	p. 107
Attention, Representation, and Affiliation	p. 131
The Parallel Chart	p. 155
Dividends of Narrative Medicine
Bearing Witness	p. 177
The Bioethics of Narrative Medicine	p. 203
A Narrative Vision for Health Care	p. 219
References	p. 239
Index	p. 259
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