ABSTRACT
In pointing to a lack of clarity within narrative medicine approaches of what actually constitutes a “story” (e.g. does this include experimental approaches such as that of Samuel Beckett?), we move on to critique the lack of poetry in narrative medicine – both a lack of content and a lack of understanding. Indeed, we see active suffocation of poetry’s voices through narrativism’s (often unacknowledged and certainly unaddressed) territorialism and imperialism. We develop the idea that chronological-based hermeneutics are largely irrelevant in lyric poetry and bring this observation into conversation with medical encounters which, like much else in life, are episodic and nonlinear. We also ask the important question: does narrative medicine try to obscure its capitalist origins and excuse its extractivist bent by suggesting that the stories it mines are “co-constructed”? We see this as using “patient-centredness” as disguise for medicine’s imperialistic re-storying (primarily through an imposition of ‘plot’ structures) of what might not have been a story in the first place, affording a double deception.
