ABSTRACT
Over the last 50 years, a wide range of academic and practical disciplines have undergone what has generally been called a 'narrative turn'. Story-telling, according to such thinkers, is the way we as humans experience, communicate and indeed create ourselves. Narrative ideas entered medicine on both sides of the Atlantic as a result of cross-disciplinary dialogue in many different centres. From the outset, narrative medicine has been as much an ethical enterprise as a clinical and educational one. Narrative approaches to ethics recognize that the singular case emerges only in the act of narrating it and that duties are incurred in the act of hearing it. Practitioners in primary care occasionally deal with some of the headline issues of bioethics, such as end-of-life decision-making, or the dilemmas associated with assisted reproduction. Seeing ethics in terms of narrative-making rather than decision-making has many advantages. Patient choice therefore becomes embedded in every moment of the consultation.
