Narrative Medicine

After Sontag: Reclaiming Metaphor

by Martha Stoddard Holmes

Genre, Vol. 44, No. 3 Fall 2011a

Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors critiqued the use of metaphoric language, particularly... more Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors critiqued the use of metaphoric language, particularly military metaphors of invasion and battle, to describe illness experiences. Metaphors generate explanatory narratives, just as stories often use a resonant metaphor as shorthand for theme. Metaphors and narratives can suggest reductive or stereotypical ways of imagining illness, disability, and other experiences of embodiment. Rather than an end to metaphoric framing of illness, however, the agency to make metaphors needs to be conferred to a larger constituency that always includes the patient. The author’s first-person ovarian cancer narrative illustrates that not having the capacity to make metaphors for one’s embodied experiences can mean late diagnosis; the dearth of effective public metaphors for imagining some internal organs, such as the ovaries, contributes to the problem. Metaphors can be reductive, but they can also generate a wide range of relationships between illness and the person experiencing it, as illustrated by examples including Margaret Atwood’s short story “Hairball.” Simile in particular, which expresses similarity but not equivalence and thus does not erase difference, can generate a healthy way of imagining illness. Some recent literature has suggested that doctors use metaphor to communicate with patients; this gives doctors the power to determine which metaphors will frame the illness and direct its narrative. The lessons of narrative medicine, which advocate that patients and doctors use narrative collaboratively to generate a more effective understanding and treatment of illness, need to be extended to include metaphor.

Reflection in/and Writing: Pedagogy and Practice in Medical Education

by Rebecca Garden

Co-authored w Wear, Delese; Zarconi, Joseph; Garden; Jones, Therese.  Academic Medicine.  POST AUTHOR CORRECTIONS, 23 March 2012
doi: 10.1097/ACM.0b013e31824d22e9

During the past decade, "reflection" and "reflective writing" have become familiar terms and... more During the past decade, "reflection" and "reflective writing" have become familiar terms and practices in medical education. The authors of this article argue that the use of the terms requires more thoughtfulness and precision, particularly because medical educators ask students to do so much reflection and reflective writing. First, the authors discuss John Dewey's thoughts on the elements of reflection. Then the authors turn the discussion to composition studies in an effort to form a more robust conception of reflective writing. In particular, they examine what the discipline of composition studies refers to as the writing process. Next, they offer two approaches to teaching composition: the expressivist orientation and the critical/cultural studies orientation. The authors examine the vigorous debate over how to respond to reflective writing, and, finally, they offer a set of recommendations for incorporating reflection and reflective writing into the medical curriculum.

Illness and Inoculation: Narrative Strategies in Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796)

by Rebecca Garden

Garden R. Illness and Inoculation: Narrative Strategies in Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796). In: Laflen A, Block M, eds. Prescribing Gender in Medicine and Narrative. New Castle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2010:64-94.

Expanding clinical empathy: An activist perspective

by Rebecca Garden

Class and Ethnicity in the Global Market for Organs: The Case of Korean Cinema

by Rebecca Garden

Sympathy, Disability, and the Nurse: Female Power in Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree

by Rebecca Garden

The problem of empathy: medicine and the humanities

by Rebecca Garden

Disability and narrative: new directions for medicine and the medical humanities

by Rebecca Garden

Telling stories about illness and disability: the limits and lessons of narrative

by Rebecca Garden

Language, Identity, and Belonging: Deaf Cultural and Narrative Perspectives

by Rebecca Garden

Mediated Communication in Context: Narrative Approaches to Understanding Encounters Between Health Care Providers and Deaf People

by Rebecca Garden

Narrative Medicine and Japan – Canonizing Curricula, Creating Applications, and Reacting to Rapid Professionalization

by Russell Kabir

Written in December 2010, submitted as honors thesis in May 2011.

Exploring the practice of medicine with narrative competence within the Japanese canon of literature, a process and... more Exploring the practice of medicine with narrative competence within the Japanese canon of literature, a process and paradigm known as narrative medicine, could suggest novel solutions to the concerns of the Japanese medical system, pedagogy, and societal infrastructure.

How the Practice and its Patients Make Therapeutic Poetry–From Normative to Narrative and Palliative to Posthumous

by Russell Kabir

Negotiating Navajo Identity: Constructing coherence from the fragments of chronic disease

by Matthew Nelson

The Artifact
Journal of the El Paso Archaeological Society
2011

The odd case of Charles Knowlton: Anatomical performance, medical narrative and professional identity in antebellum America

by Michael Sappol