Narrative Medicine
Danielle Spencer
Abstract
Abstract Narrative medicine is narrative hermeneutics put into practice in healthcare. Reflecting key aspects of the narrative turn, it is a methodology of clinical care conducted with attentiveness to narrative as well as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry at the nexus of healthcare and the humanities. The methodic claim is that narrative skills abet clinical practice—good readers make good doctors—and such utility secures a place for narrative medicine within the closed gates of biomedicine. Yet once inside, hermeneutics emerges, and the very nature of the textual roles and of the text itself are fruitfully explored. This tension between method and a more contemporary understanding of narrative hermeneutics evinces Gadamer’s distinction between methodic and hermeneutical epistemological frameworks. It proves valuable, drawing attention to interpretation within medicine itself and empowering all who engage in healthcare—clinicians and nonclinicians alike—to become emboldened as readers, writers, and interpreters and to engage in meaning-making as an ongoing interpretive process.