ABSTRACT
Narrative-based medicine is often considered as the medical humanities’ jewel in the crown, offering a parallel way to understand patients beyond the clinical chart. Within medical education, where the medical/health humanities are invoked, narrative approaches – reading and writing stories for better understanding of patients and the clinical encounter – are usually prominent. As sub-genres of literature, patients’ accounts of their illnesses (illness narratives) and doctors’ accounts of their working lives (medical autoethnographies) are highly popular, entering best-seller lists. But narrative approaches to medicine are rarely critiqued. What makes a medical narrative and why are they so seductive? Further, the very act of diagnosis has been cast as a narrative event, specifically embracing plot, while classic ethics cases in medicine, taught widely to medical students through a rational ‘principles’ of ethical judgement approach, have been recast as “stories”, taking the shine off their veracity. However, where narrative medicine has become a dominant discourse in medical humanities it affords an imperialism and resists critique. Meanwhile, narrative medicine continues to be commodified and instrumentalised through a host of courses.
