This innovative volume provides fresh perspectives on how medical students and patients construct identities in relation to each other, using stories of their clinical encounters. It explores how paying attention to medical students’ and patients’ stories in clinical teaching encounters can encourage empathy and the formation of professional identities that embody desirable values such as integrity and respect. Written by an experienced clinician and based on original, rigorous research combining ethnography and dialogic narrative analysis, Storytelling Encounters as Medical Education: Crafting Relational Identity includes patient stories alongside those of students and clinical teachers. This is an important contribution for all those interested in medical education, narrative medicine, person-centred care and identity formation in healthcare. It will also be of value to scholars in a range of other disciplines, who are using a dialogic approach.

Throughout our lives, story is the medium each of us uses to make sense of our environment and relationships. Stories provide meaning and context, enriching our experiences and equipping us with a framework to navigate our existence. This unique, practical book for healthcare trainees, practitioners and educators explores the ideas and practice of narrative and storytelling that lie at the very heart of clinical medicine and the patient ‘experience’ of care. It shows how story and narrative can be used effectively to help convey concepts such as prognosis and the effect of illness upon life, and to prepare patients and their relatives for difficult and painful news. Offering a particular insight into communication by and between healthcare professionals, and how it can be refocused and improved, this updated and expanded second edition remains an invaluable teaching aid for educators working in both small and large formats, and for under- and postgraduate students.

Narrative medicine is a fresh discipline of health care that helps patients and health professionals to tell and listen to the complex and unique stories of illness. The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine expresses the collective experience and discoveries of the originators of the field. Arising at Columbia University in 2000 from roots in the humanities and patient-centered care, narrative medicine draws patients, doctors, nurses, therapists, and health activists together to re-imagine a health care based on trust and trustworthiness, humility, and mutual recognition. Over a decade of education and research has crystallized the goals and methods of narrative medicine, leading to increasingly powerful means to improve the care that patients receive. The methods described in this book harness creativity and insight to help the professionals in being with patients, not just to diagnose and treat them but to bear witness to what they undergo. Narrative medicine training in literary theory, philosophy, narrative ethics, and the creative arts increases clinicians' capacity to perceive the turmoil and suffering borne by patients and to help them to cohere or endure the chaos of illness. Narrative medicine has achieved an international reputation and reach. Many health care settings adopt methods of narrative medicine in teaching and practice. Through the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine graduate program and health professions school curricula at Columbia University, more and more clinicians and scholars have obtained the rigorous training necessary to practice and teach narrative medicine. This text is offered to all who seek the opportunity for disciplined training in narrative medicine. By clearly articulating our principles and practice, this book provides the standards of the field for those who want to join us in seeking authenticity, recognition, affiliation, and justice in a narrative health care.

This book critically analyses how politics and power affect the ways that medicine is taught and learned. Challenging society’s historic reluctance to connect the realm of politics to the realm of medicine, Medical Education, Politics and Social Justice: The Contradiction Cure emphasizes the need for medical students to engage with social justice issues, including global health crises resulting from the climate emergency, and the health implications of widening social inequality. Arguing for an increased focus on community-based learning, rather than acute care, this innovative text maps the territory of medicine’s contradictory engagement with politics as a springboard for creative curriculum design. It demonstrates why the socially disempowered - such as political and climate refugees, the homeless, or those without health insurance should be primary subjects of attention for medical students, while exploring how political engagement can be refined, sharp, cultivated and creative, engaging imagination and demanding innovation Exploring how the medical humanities can promote engagement with politics to improve medical education, this book is a ground-breaking and inspiring contribution. It is an essential read for all those with a focus on medical education and medical humanities, as well as medical and healthcare students with an interest in the social determinants of health.

What is it like to live with an illness? How do diagnostic procedures, treatments, and other encounters with medical institutions affect a patient's private and social life? By asking these types of questions, illness narratives have gained a reputation as a scientific domain in medicine in the last thirty years. Today, a patient's story plays an important role in doctor-patient communication and the development of a healing relationship. However, whereas patient experiences have been well acknowledged, methodologically reflected upon and widely collected as research data, less consideration has been invested in exploring how they work in practice. Used in the context of diagnosis, treatment, and teaching, patient stories give us a new perspective on how healthcare could be improved. Illness Narratives in Practice: Potentials and Challenges of Using Narratives in Health-related Contexts highlights the problems, challenges, and opportunities we face when using patient perspectives in practice and research in a clear format to provide readers with a comprehensive overview of this field. It investigates the epistemological foundations and communicational properties of illness narratives, as well as the pragmatic effects of using them as clinical and educational instruments. Significantly, it presents new examples from patient intakes and interviews that illustrate the disparity in communication between patients and medical professionals. The studies in this book also evaluate the experiences of medical practitioners and students who consciously use patient narratives as a tool for improved communication and diagnosis. Divided into eight sections with practical examples for medical teaching and practice, this book covers the use of patient narratives in communication training and decision making across medicine and psychotherapy. In addition, it reflects on the ethical aspects of working with a patient's personal experience of their illness, reports on cultural differences across the globe, and analyses how patients' stories are used in politics and the media. Written by scholars from multiple disciplines across clinical and theoretical fields, this rich resource provides a critical stance on the use of narratives in medical research, education, and practice.

A patient's job is to tell the physician what hurts, and the physician's job is to fix it. But how does the physician know what is wrong? What becomes of the patient's story when the patient becomes a case? Addressing readers on both sides of the patient-physician encounter, Kathryn Hunter looks at medicine as an art that relies heavily on telling and interpreting a story--the patient's story of illness and its symptoms.

This book explores previously unexamined overlaps between the poetic imagination and the medical mind. It shows how appreciation of poetry can help us to engage with medicine in more intense ways based on ‘de-familiarising’ old habits and bringing poetic forms of ‘close reading’ to the clinic. Bleakley and Neilson carry out an extensive critical examination of the well-established practices of narrative medicine to show that non-narrative, lyrical poetry does different kind of work, previously unexamined, such as place eclipsing time. They articulate a groundbreaking ‘lyrical medicine’ that promotes aesthetic, ethical and political practices as well as noting the often-concealed metaphor cache of biomedicine. Demonstrating that ambiguity is a key resource in both poetry and medicine, the authors anatomise poetic and medical practices as forms of extended and situated cognition, grounded in close readings of singular contexts. They illustrate structural correspondences between poetic diction and clinical thinking, such as use of sound and metaphor. This provocative examination of the meaningful overlap between poetic and clinical work is an essential read for researchers and practitioners interested in extending the reach of medical and health humanities, narrative medicine, medical education and English literature.