Literature and Medicine: A Narrative Medicine Toolkit, University of Virginia

As the late writer Joan Didion noted, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." It's that simple: storying is fundamental to our humanity and our common life. No surprise, then, that healthcare is steeped in stories, those of ill and suffering persons (and their carers) enmeshed in life-altering experiences but also the narratives of physicians and other clinicians. Tales of illness, injury, dying, caring, and healing—whether spontaneously offered or carefully wrought—take many forms and serve many purposes within and beyond healthcare. Even now, medicine and healthcare are changing to recognize the place and power of stories in its midst. Medicine is itself being changed as narrative knowledge complements and completes bioscientific understandings of illness, health, cure, and care and as health professionals learn to practice with "narrative competence." Research is ongoing into the promise and possibilities for narrative medicine to improve patient-clinician relationships, healthcare team interactions, quality of care and outcomes for patients, and health professionals' reflective practice. Grounded in texts, tropes. and techniques of literature, this intensive two-week course explores medicine as a narrative-based enterprise and introduces narrative medicine as a set of principles and practices. We address especially • core skills of close reading and close listening, observation, analysis, and interpretation (attention); • communicative/expressive acts of discussion, telling, writing, and imaging (representation); and • responsive modes of empathy, reflection, moral imagination, and action (affiliation). Course participants practice using this narrative medicine toolkit so as to function as narratively competent clinicians. They engage with diverse texts of many literary genres and forms in highly interactive, discussion-based class sessions; complete writing and presentation assignments in and outside of class; and carry out reflective/creative work related to their own professional and personal experience. This information has been collected for the Post-Discipline Online Syllabus Database. The database explores the use of literature by schools of professional education in North America. It forms part of a larger project titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities, led by Dr Merve Emre with the assistance of Dr Hayley G. Toth. You can find more information about the project at https://postdiscipline.english.ox.ac.uk/. Data was collected and accurate in 2021/22.