ENG 122 CC: NARRATIVE MEDICINE

CC: NARRATIVE MEDICINE

How can narratives serve as a form of care? How can reading and telling stories be therapeutic? Although most of us think of literature and medicine as belonging to different worlds—not to speak of different disciplines—the new field of narrative medicine brings them into connection. When people are ill, they are at their most vulnerable; it’s more than a figure of speech to say that the relation between doctor and patient is a matter of life and death. What if an understanding of how narrative works could actually help us when we are most vulnerable? What if narrative could improve the quality of medical care? The question is not just individual but social: race, gender, and income all affect the kind of medical care people receive, and even how long they live. Narrative medicine is founded on the conviction that how we listen to and tell stories can have a role in improving the quality of medical care, that it can even intervene in the social inequities that mar our current health care system. Reading novels and short stories about illness, juxtaposing literary texts with medical records and doctor’s stories, looking at sociological and economic data about inequities in health care, this course considers how reading and telling stories can be therapeutic, interpreting stories can be diagnostic, and literary empathy can model relations of patient care. Authors may include Henry James, Lori Moore, Alice Munro, Leo Tolstoy, Edwidge Danticat, Leslie Jamison, Rita Charon, Claudia Rankine, Natasha Tretheway, Bettina Judd, Margaret Edson, Aleksander Hemon, and Paul Kalanithi.