ABSTRACT
The author argues that close noticing is an integral part of clinical acumen and to frustrate its early education is a mistake. In the same way, understanding and using narrative capabilities are central to clinical education. Throughout this chapter the author describe the uses of tropes such as style, achieved through use of linguistic devices or figures of speech such as rhetoric, genres, metonymy and metaphor. The clinical encounter then provides a rather unusual dynamic for storytelling exchanges. In the reciprocal narratives of the clinical encounter, a patient first tells a story to a doctor. As the patient tells his or her story, the doctor gradually tells a story back to the patient as a first formulation of a diagnosis or differential diagnosis, with an aim to provide a final diagnosis and treatment plan. William James noted, rhetorically, that all human thinking is two kinds, reasoning thinking, and narrative, descriptive, contemplative thinking.
