ABSTRACT
Chapter Three proposes that understanding suffering must be the explicit foundation of health professional training. Different types and categories of suffering are explored along with typical sorts of responses, from redemption to salvation and transcendence. Historically, these underpin the curriculum of health professional training. Multimodal forms of learning about suffering include concrete experiential, conceptual, narrative, abstract and symbolic which appear as mediators in the relationship between health professional and patient. Cultural melancholy, suffering strangers and the chiasma are introduced as ways of grappling with the process of understanding people who are suffering in a framework that includes stitching together, deconstructing and containing suffering.
