ABSTRACT
As physician and literary scholar Rita Charon describes, narrative medicine is medicine practiced with the “narrative skills of recognizing, absorbing, interpreting, and being moved by the stories of illness” (Charon 2006: 4). One of its fundamental tenets is the importance of narrative competence , of attending to the form and structure of storytelling. A clinician taking a patient history, like the skilled reader of a literary work, must recognize and understand not simply data as it fi ts into checkboxes of the electronic medical record but also the way the patient relates his experience, including context, narrative voice, tone, fi gurative language, and temporality. Where does the account begin? What is left out? Which perspectives are represented, and how? Further, how do both teller and receiver construct meaning reciprocally-and what is the form and ethics of this exchange?
