ABSTRACT
We unpack unacknowledged similarities between the biomedical epistemology (which can be aphorised as rendering the generalised body as data), and narrative medicine (which renders the patient’s story as data, sometimes unaware of this reduction), as “narrative evidence based medicine”. We consider how Rita Charon and colleagues’ idiosyncratic form of Narrative Medicine (that we capitalise), which began as a redressal of the biomedical imperative in modern medicine, ironically can be seen to seek biomedical legitimacy by demonstrating positive pedagogical and practical outcomes (“evidence”). Our comparative method here is literary – we use metaphor as a means of understanding. We note that literary theory too has sought scientific legitimacy at the level of method, coming to fruition in practices of “close reading” much lauded by narrative medicine enthusiasts. However, we note dangers in this approach, such as literature reduced to engineering principles or “devices”, but from this we rescue the important device of “defamiliarisation” or “seeing otherwise” through close reading of texts. While Charonian Narrative Medicine traces this to the work of I.A. Richards, we go further back to historical origins in Russian Formalism and the work of Viktor Shklovsky. This work infects much of our own critical project throughout this book, for example where it refers to the importance of “sound” in poetry, that we see as crucial to patterns of medical diagnostic work.
