ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the role of dialogue and conversations in medical practice and medical education. After an autobiographical introduction, it describes an approach to teaching and practising interactional skills that is aligned with the field of narrative medicine and develops the concept of “the patient as text,” seeing interactions between physicians and patients (or between teachers and learners) as “moving texts” where each participant can influence the other’s sense of meaning. The chapter includes a description of this process occurring in a session when the author supervised a younger colleague in the context of a seminar where a group of physicians explored “The Right Stuff of Medicine” and includes extracts from contemporaneous notes and diary entries from meetings of the group in Norway and Scotland.
