The Art of Narrative Medicine, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Narrative medicine, as defined by Rita Charon, MD is to "recognize, absorb, interpret and be moved by stories of illness." The course will help students develop the ability to "perceive the suffering, to bring interpretive rigor to what they perceive, to handle the inevitable oscillations between identification and detachment, to see events of illness from multiple points of view, to envision the ramifications of illness, and to be moved by it to action [1]." Exposure to and application of narrative medicine concepts provides and enhances the skills required to build humanistic, therapeutic alliances with patients, applicable across a wide spectrum of clinical complexity and challenging presentations. In this course, students explore medically themed literary and art works to engage with the narrative aspects of modern illness, including literature around pandemics. They will also hone their skills of collecting, analyzing, and producing creative and academic writing. 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.