What Is Narrative Medicine?

Narrative medicine is not easy to describe. The very terms “narrative” and “medicine” seem to fall in fundamentally different fields. But their fusion is critical to address some of the issues in our modern medical system that often diminish the human aspects of the clinical encounter.

Narrative medicine has the potential to be a powerful healing tool; in terms of the Circle of Health, it might be said to represent what could happen at the intersection of Mindful Awareness, Personal Development, Mind & Emotions, and perhaps even Spirit and Soul.

The art of telling stories and the art of deeply listening to stories used to be central to the relationship between patients and clinicians. Today, those arts are often undervalued in medical encounters that tend to “privilege the biology over the biography.”¹ This creates disconnection between patients and caregivers that can be repaired by promoting the role of telling and receiving stories as central in clinical exchanges. Patients have a story that needs to be heard, not just symptoms that need to be treated. Pain is often as much psychological as somatic: our emotions, thoughts, and stories influence our awareness of pain and its effect on our lives.

It is critical for clinicians to practice generous, attentive listening and to invite and facilitate storytelling from their patients, because often the story verbalizes things the body is trying to communicate through its ailments.

Practicing narrative medicine can facilitate better health care, because it restores value to the subjective experience of suffering that is often lost in the objective stance in which clinicians are trained. Narrative medicine has been deemed “one of medicine’s most important internal renovations,”² and is being integrated into the system in myriad ways.

How Was Narrative Medicine Started?

Narrative medicine emerged as a response to patients’ complaints that their clinicians did not listen to them, or did not seem to truly care about their suffering. Internist and literary scholar Rita Charon coined the term “narrative medicine” and launched the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University in 1996. Her goal was to help health care professionals improve communication and collaboration with their patients and to bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences. At the heart of her mission lies the belief that effective health care “requires the ability to recognize, absorb, interpret, be moved by, and act on the stories of illness.”³ Charon considers narrative medicine a basic science mandatory for medical practice.⁴ Though not always called narrative medicine, many endeavors in medical education and practice bring together literature and medicine, as well as the social and behavioral sciences, under this umbrella category.