ABSTRACT
Narratives deal primarily in the ‘medium-sized, human-scale world of everyday experience’. Without going into the particulars of the debate here, the narrative identity hypothesis is clearly relevant to the discourse about people with dementia in which ‘selfhood’ becomes a contested terrain. Despite calls to curtail the role narrative plays in medical humanities research, narrative remains both an important target of analysis and crucial research tool. In contrast to the supportive role, medical humanities scholars frequently position themselves as opposed to the structures and institutional power of biomedicine. Medical humanities scholars may be criticised for assuming a merely oppositional stance to biomedicine—providing an endless ‘critique’ without being able to go beyond that critique. These two elements of illness narratives—‘countering’ and exploring the experience of given illness with the object of elucidating both health-care professionals and the general public—have been central to the development of the medical humanities. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
